Thursday, August 18, 2005

"Mothers for Peace"

Cindy Sheehan inspires mothers for peace as well as many thousands of other peace lovers. If you're interested in reading more about last night's vigils nation-wide, hit the True Majority Link to the right.

Virginia Woolf says in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid": "Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead."

A pacifist mother-poet and dear friend, Barbra Minar, helps us "think peace into existence."

Mothers for Peace

Listen to me, People of the Council
planning war
if you nursed a crying baby
holding his head in your palm
singing songs your mother sang to you
if you held out your arms
to keep his first steps safe
and cried for him
when he broke his arm
if you laughed with him
at monkeys in the zoo
and ran beside his bike
while he learned to ride
if you showed him
hawks nesting in the oak
and taught him to deeply love his brother
if you watched him grow
until he was a man
praying daily for his safety
then People of the Council
you would offer this child
a cup of water
not a bowl of blood.

barbra minar
august 2005

1 comment:

r said...

Thank you for sharing this with your readers, Chella.

I've been thinking a lot about Cindy Sheehan the last few days; somehow she speaks for so many of us.

The amount of invective launched against her by the conservative right is astonishing to me. It's not Cindy Sheehan that scares them, it's the thousands of people that are down there in Texas supporting her, and the tens of thousands more that want the same question asked.
"For what noble cause are our young men and women dying for?"