5 Peace poems

We wondered what our walk should mean, taking that un-march quietly; the sun stared at our signs— “Thou shalt not kill.” Men by a tavern said, “Those foreigners . . .” to a woman with a fur, who turned away— like an elevator going down, their look at us. Along a curb, their signs lined across, a picket line stopped and stared the whole width of the street, at ours: “Unfair.” Above our heads the sound truck blared— by the park, under the autumn trees— it said that love could fill the atmosphere: Occur, slow the other fallout, unseen, on islands everywhere—fallout, falling unheard. We held our poster up to shade our eyes. At the end we just walked away; no one was there to tell us where to leave the signs.

Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds— who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.) Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.

“He does not come to coo.” —Gerard Manley Hopkins Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove, Symbol not only of Peace but sexual Love, the couple nestled and brooding. After coupling, the human animal needs The woman safe for nine months and more. But the man after his turbulent minute or two Is expendable. Usefully rash, reckless For defense, in his void of redundancy Willing to death and destruction. Monkey-mind envies the male Dove Who equally with the female secretes Pigeon milk for the young from his throat. For peace, send all human males between Fourteen and twenty-five to school On the Moon, or better yet Mars. But women too are capable of Unpeace, Yes, and we older men too, venom-throats. Here’s a great comic who says on our journey We choose one of two tributaries: the River Of Peace, or the River of Productivity. The current of Art he says runs not between Banks with birdsong in the fragrant shadows— No, an artist must follow the stinks and rapids Of the branch that drives the millstones and dynamos. Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative Of creation, or the absence of war? The teaching says Peace is a positive energy. Still something in me resists that sweet milk, My mind resembles my restless, inferior cousin Who fires his shit in handfuls from his cage.

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail More tense than felons but relieved to find The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped From every mother’s windowpane, obscene The bloodlust sweating from the public heart, The dog authority slavering at your throat. A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean. The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew Troubling the captains for plain decencies, A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out To establish new theocracies to west, A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas Ten miles above the sodomites and fish. These inmates loved the only living doves. Like all men hunted from the world you made A good community, voyaging the storm To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat; Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed, The gaunt politicals construed our hate. The opposite of all armies, you were best Opposing uniformity and yourselves; Prison and personality were your fate. You suffered not so physically but knew Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind. Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach Erupting in his face damn all your kind. Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us Are equally with those who shed the blood The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is What we come back to in the armistice.

I listen and listen but how do I know Peace Peace in the plural says please or pleads I hear the whole song divide the state as one appeals past the last centuries’ pealing bells wren under eaves ruins another wren’s heaven dying sympathies appear as a pear or peas with her territory her tune I want a nest clinging to the twine Please Please in the plural not a flag a mead hall not a circumstance puts pain’s poor plea deeper in the apparent a stable not a stability where animals dream pressure the daylily plant the possible prayer and dreaming among them I tell the stranger pulling apart the sepal petals by their dusty crease in my mind I can’t I don’t know how to sing