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Writings for Peace

Bringing you poetry and prose from around the world to reflect the broader humanitarian mission of Peace Partners. It is our hope to provide a safe space for compassion, empathy, and insight into our shared want for a more peaceful society. Here we showcase work from familiar names and those too-long overlooked by history, as well as the new and emerging voices of today.

Meditation Beside a Poem

26/6/2021

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​Amid the bubbling buzz of exotic itineraries we can sometimes forget that any holiday abroad is itself a relative privilege, and that each town nook and bedsit is no less sublime for being here.
Pandemic or not, staycation planning is the affordable norm for so many in this country and a matter of preference for those content to bask in the garden’s afterglow, as in this charmed reflection by Brazilian poet Adélia Prado:
Picture
Meditation Beside a Poem

I pruned the rosebush at precisely the right moment
and left town for days,
having learned once and for all
to wait biblically
for the time of every thing.
When I opened the window, there it was
as I’d never seen it before,
studded
with buds,
some already with pale rose
peeking out from between sepals,
clusters of living jewels.
My bad back,
my disappointment with the limits of time,
the enormous effort to be understood--
all turned to dust
before this recurrent miracle.
The cyclical, perceptible roses
made themselves marvellous.
No one can move me
from this sudden knowing
beyond the edge of reason:
mercy is intact.
Billowing greed,
pummelling fists,
high-pitched fury:
nothing can hold back the gold of corollas
or—believe me—fragrance.
Simply because it’s September.



​Born in 1935, Prado is one of Brazil’s most revered contemporary poets, and yet she rarely steps out and away from her native city of Divinópolis. Her deeply spiritual, if sometimes overtly religious work is a study in the simple devotions of domestic life. It’s telling here that her leaving town warrants so little fanfare on the page; rather, it serves only to bring us back to the rosebush and Prado’s deeper reflection. The poem serves as a gentle reminder, perhaps, that all the stunning wonder in the world is within our reach, here in the quiet hours of our every day.

​
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TROPICS

13/6/2021

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​As temperatures rise and as we rise to greet another Summer solstice there is, of course, that inevitable push and pull toward the coast; to spread ourselves on to the white sand beaches of Santorini and Malaga, or even meander the rolling hills of Tuscany.
​We can only hope for some holiday reprieve, though notion of a local staycation appear far more likely this year. But then after this long pandemic winter, any getaway is gift enough. In the spirit of staycation fantasies, we are delighted to share these words from Ellen Bryant Voigt:
Picture
Tropics

In the still morning when you move
toward me in sleep for love,
I dream of

an island where long-stemmed cranes,
serious weather vanes,
turn slowly on one

foot. There the dragonfly folds
his mica wings and rides
the tall reed

close as a handle. The hippo yawns,
nods to thick pythons,
slack and drowsy, who droop down

like untied sashes
from the trees. The brash
hyenas do not cackle

and run but lie with their paws
on their heads like dogs.
The lazy crow’s caw

falls like a sigh. In the field
below, the fat moles build
their dull passage with an old

instinct that needs
no light or waking; its slow beat
turns the hand in sleep

as we turn toward each other
in the ripe air of summer,
before the change of weather,

before the heavy drop
of the apples.



Here Voigt speaks to the great imaginative power in us all; to reach back into that most sublime corner of our being and make of it a paradise. Even as the poem sets us in bed we’re free, soaring over some enchanted landscape alongside our speaker and given over to another world so far removed from the here and now. Take comfort in your resilience, and in the mind’s ability to bring those white sand beaches home.​
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  • Home
  • What We Do
    • Pledge to Peace
    • Humanitarian Aid >
      • Food for People
    • Peace Education >
      • Peace Education Support
      • Peace Education FAQs
  • Who we are
    • Meet our Team
    • Volunteer with Us
  • News & Stories
    • Latest News
    • Writings for Peace
    • e-Bulletin
  • Our Partnerships
    • Partnership Initiatives
    • Become a Partner
    • Our Memberships
  • Donate
    • Fundraising
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