Answering Back #16

Wage Peace

‘The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.’

Hannah Arendt

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Wage Peace

by Judyth Hill

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Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the out-breath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

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There is no such thing as Peace

by David Dayson

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There is only the collective sum of actions 
by peaceful people.

Go about your daily life peacefully:

Intend peace.
Speak peace.
Make everything you do become
a step towards peaceful outcomes.

This I truly mean: 
Peace is in your hands.

I am sorry if this offends those
who may be in a state of mind 
which is hermetic,
Hell-bent on waging war,
I am afraid to say, everyone 
who enables war is complicit,

and I do mean everyone. 

When a nation orchestrates 
ethnic cleansing by violence and famine, 

there is a score, 
there are players, 
there is a conductor,
there are those who sell the tickets, 

and there’s an audience who watches, 
listens and can’t turn away, cannot.

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