Wage Peace – Mary Oliver
Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble;
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of redwing 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, clothespins, clean rivers. Make soup.
Play music. Learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries
Imagine grief as the outbreath 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. Don’t wait another minute.
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died – Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Another Planet – Dunya Mikhail
- Be Kind, Rewind – Neil Silberblatt
- Black Momma Math – Kimberly Jae
- Boplicity or Jimmy Throws a Houseparty for Huey Newton – Daniel B. Summerhill
- Capitol Air – Allen Ginsburg
- Combat Primer – Charles Bukowski
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Dismiss Whatever Insults Your Own Soul – Walt Whitman
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads – Martha Rivera-Garrido
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo – Michael Korson
- Footprints In Your Heart – Eleanor Roosvelt
- For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet – Joy Harjo
- Forgetfulness – Billy Collins
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- Half-light – Dāshaun Washington
- Homesick: A Plea for Our Planet – Andrea Gibson
- How She Heard It – Todd Davis
- How to Slay a Dragon – Rebecca Dupas
- I Talked to a Lady – Tanya Howden
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- Instructions before visiting Earth – James McCrae
- KINDNESS – Naomi Shihab Nye
- Love is Not All – Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Men – Maya Angelou
- Millennium Blessing – Stephen Levine
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges – Sam Sax
- Old Man Eating Alone – Billy Collins
- Relax – Ellen Bass
- Shoveling Snow With Buddha – Billy Collins
- Sleeping in the Forest – Mary Oliver
- Small Stack of Books – Blake Nelson
- Soliloquy of the Solipsist – Sylvia Plath
- Squirrel – Lynn Ungar
- Tangled Up In Blue – Bob Dylan
- The Caveman’s Lament – Brian Bilston
- The Four Noble Truths – Jake Onami Agnew
- The History of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Layers – Stanley Kunitz
- The Long Boat – Stanley Kunitz
- The Moon is Full Tonight – Billy Collins
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- The War Works Hard – Dunya Mikhail
- To Diego with Love – Frida Kalko
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Two poems – Wendell Berry
- Two poems – Yehuda Amichai
- Two-bloods – Rolando Kattan
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver
- War Primer – Bertholt Brecht
- We are the Trees – J Raymond
- We will meet, don’t be in such a rush – Hala alShrouf
- What I Learned From Listening to a Stutterer – Ellen Zorin
- Who Says Words With My Mouth? – Jalal ad-Din Rumi
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