I was thinking about peace today and feeling weary. I used to shout about it, used to march about it, wanted to tear down buildings and burn flags about it. I was thinking about Ghandi, about Martin Luther King Jr., about how I’ve been at war with my own thoughts for 55 years now and how it’s time to lay down the sword, the shield, the desire to win and do what Christ and Nanak and Muhammad and John and Oko said to do: to love, to see what that can do. Yeah, it’s corny and naïve and let’s the other guy “win.” But it seems that winning is the object of war, so peace must be some kind of surrender, if only to the struggle. Don’t get me wrong, doesn’t mean I won’t put on my marchin’ boots again one day, won’t put my vote where my heart is and won’t keep praying every day for peace. It’s the conflict, the back-and-forth that I’m tired of having around. So, here’s my tribute to peace in the written word, photos and a bit of John Lennon to inspire. I wish for you true peace within that spreads like morning sunlight across the surface of this planet into every heart that beats.

All poems are from Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, edited by Joan Murray, Beacon Press, Publishers. 

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry
 

ON PRAYER

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
and knows that if there is no other shore
They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

Czeslaw Milosz
Tr. by Robert Hass 

I know the truth –
give up all other truths!

I know the truth—give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look—it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

Marina Tsvetayeva
Tr. by Elaine Feinstein

Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon from The Best of John Lennon