Peace must be worked for. It isn’t easy. Nobody ever said it was. I have seen this. The world won’t end tomorrow, and many of us in the world have to continue the long and painful process of finding peace and justice. It is work, but it is worthwhile.
This evening I found an old message from a woman in Georgia who asked if she could send a poem of mine to her friend who is suffering from PTSD. The message had been shunted into the “other” box in my facebook mail. I’ll share the poem here, because it is relevant to my ENEMIES work. I understand PTSD – it is not easy to come back to the US after listening to three months of horrific stories and touring mass graves. It isn’t something I would recommend as a vacation.
A day later I heard back from this woman. She had sent my poem to her friend who is now re-deployed in Afghanistan. He cried when he read it.
Peace isn’t easy. But that doesn’t make it not worth working for.
This is the poem. I wrote it for the solstice eclipse that happened last year. It’s meaning goes quite far into my own life, and it is very relevant to everything I am doing in ENEMIES.
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Solstice Eclipse
Minute by minute,
under the gaze of the waning moon,
the dark burn of winter has turned and is falling away.
Last year the night sky was shattered, and
now the solstice moon is hiding,
eclipsing in silence
behind a thick ceiling of gently-lit clouds.
In the distance a siren is wailing,
but I hear only the dropping
of minutes into an empty bowl.
And now even that has stopped
as the earth swings on her pendulum
back toward another season of seasons
and I hold on to keep from falling away into space
where the broken pieces of older nights
drift out beyond the pull of gravity.
I see you moon,
behind the clouds,
I see you.
I know you have hidden
behind the earth this night
for a moment of reprieve
from the glaring gaze of the sun.
The siren has faded,
and the long night, once split and broken,
is whole again.
I know you are here
even though you are shy and hiding.
Somewhere tonight lovers are laying under you,
and other poets, better than I,
are writing words about you.
Somewhere tonight people are killing others under your gaze
and you hide from it all
eclipsing behind clouds on this longest night.
Perhaps if I had to watch both the lovers
and the killers, the sated
and the starving,
I would hide as well.
You don’t know that the night was broken
and you don’t care
that I will run through your touch once more,
or that sometime again I will swim naked
through a sparkling sea under your silken gaze.
Now that this longest night has passed and you have hidden,
I will still wonder about you
when I am gazing across meadows
of dancing fireflies,
And you will caress me
again without knowing.
– Nelson Guda
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