Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Wage Peace

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Trees at Apollonia, Albania

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing 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, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words 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.

Celebrate today.

-Judyth Hill

6 comments:

MsTypo said...

Lovely poem. Beautiful photo! :)

CanadianSwiss said...

Awsome pict! Also loved you posts about Malta and Apollonia. But the older ladies with daysies and the olives??? You get an A+++ from me :)

The Giant said...

What a beautiful poem! I needed to find that today, and it really spoke to me. Thank you.

Tinsie said...

That's a beautiful photo! Here's to today :-)

GMG said...

Hi Kim! Sorry for the long delay in coming here, but the last two weeks were too hectic!
Finally I managed to get to your blog, and see some wonderful pictures! Loved to re-live Apollonia. What about the guard; is he still there? and drunken? ;))
Meanwhile Blogtrotter is back to Greece in November 2007! Hope you enjoy and have a great week!

Ginnie Hart said...

Interestingly, Kim, my teaching in massage school was the opposite of this poem....to breathe in all the good (through the nose) and breathe out all the bad (through the mouth). But the point is well-taken. It really is a lovely post!