The Voices in Wartime Education Project seeks submissions for an on-line booklet, "Waging Peace," to celebrate the International Day of Peace in September. Voices is asking for contributions from members of poems, narratives, quotes, photographs and pictures. You have to join My Voice to submit your entries. Go to My Voice.
One of the submissions comes from poet and poetry performer Judyth Hill, formerly of Sapello, N.M., and now living in San Juan de Allende in Mexico. Judyth sent this poem to me in slightly different form when war was breaking out in Iraq six years ago.
Wage Peace
Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing 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, memorize the words 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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