Peace, That Incendiary Dove

Peace, That Incendiary Dove

We will attack you
if you don’t make peace,

if you don’t
build it from your bodies,
soft and bruised,
arms as thin
as olive twigs. 

We will drop
our big, beautiful bombs.
We’ve already dropped
such beautiful bombs.
They sail the air,
precision doves.
They detonate
          peace
                    peace
                               peace. 

Peace rings in your ears  
in the aid line.
It rings in your ears
in Tehran.

We will leave you
with nothing
except
                              peace.

It transcends
all understanding. 

Photo by Shubhankar Bhowmick on Unsplash

The Prompt

Loves, I don’t really know what to say today. The world feels so heavy. Or rather, it feels like a few people are sitting on top of it, building towers that are ever higher, ever heavier, and ever more dependent on the misery and bloodshed of the masses who sit on the ground.

How can people be so terrible?

Here is another question I’ve been asking myself lately: How can people be so beautiful? Because we are both of those things, aren’t we?

How can I hold all this anger? How can I hold all this love? Maybe the only viable solution is to break open. With the world being what it is, I think there is little risk and little hope that I will ever be glued back together again.

For today’s prompt, I offer you a word that should be beautiful and can be beautiful but has also become a pretext for war, a weapon in its own right: peace.

We each have our own histories with this word, our own associations with it. Many of mine are biblical, and if you have a Christian background, you likely picked up on Biblical references woven into my poem. In my current, post-Mormon, day-to-day life, when I think of peace, I think of what I feel walking through the woods. I think of kindnesses among family and friends and neighbors. I think of Wendell Berry’s gorgeous poem “The Peace of Wild Things.”

The news gives me other things to think about, bigger longings to feel, bigger fears to hold, endless hypocrisies to sift through.

What does the word peace conjure for you? What does peace feel like for you? Where does it sit in your body? Where do you sense it in the world around you? Where do you find yourself knocked over by its absence?

I am grateful to all of you. The little community that has formed here feels like a pocket of peace in this turbulent ocean of a world. I suspect that the world has many of these pockets, so many. Maybe these pockets can join together to become the sea.

If you write a poem inspired by the word peace or if you have any other reflections or experiences to share, please join me in the comments thread! I love interacting with you there.