Questions? Comments? -K. E. Dennis
Poetry Worldwide (all else....)
This is not an Irish poem - but I've been thinking of it a great deal as the referendum approaches.
Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli, has written many deeply moving poems, but this one, it seems to me, perfectly captures the aching ambiguity - hope mingled w/ grief, memories of tragedy coexisting w/the urgent desire for respite - that must be in many hearts as the vote approaches.
Wild Peace
|
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994
|
Not the one of an armistice,
not even the one of the vision of wolf and lamb,
but,
as in your heart after an excitement:
to talk only of a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
I am grown up.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say "Mama."
Peace
without the commotion of turning swords into plowshares,
without words, without
the sound of heavy seals; let it be light
on top, like lazy white foam.
Rest for the wounds,
not even healing.
(And the scream of orphans is passed on from one generation
to another, as in a relay race: the baton won't fall.)
Let it be
like wild flowers,
suddenly, an imperative of the field:
wild peace.