Making Peace
A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
Graeme asked what I thought about Levertov's political poetry, and her commitment to addressing public issues in the public square. I think she answers the questions in this poem. As a committed poet she wrote out of her experience and when she became a political and peace activist then it was inevitable, and essential that her poetry would reflect that experience if it was to continue to be the authentic voice of the poet. And what this poem celebrates and demonstrates is the power of words to transform and renew, to articulate and to interrogate, to be instuments of justice and the building blocks of peace.
I read this poem yesterday, just after reading online the revelations about children being deliberately targeted by snipers in Syria. See here. Such egregious behaviour appals and outrages; more than that it encourages that most lethal of responses, despair. However. The image in my mind of a human being, staring intently through a telescopic sight, focusing clearly on the face of a child, and believing that by pulling the trigger he is doing something meaningful and praiseworthy for some morally insane master, is so revolting that despair is the last emotion I am likely to feel.
Against such images of the hidden sniper looking at a closeup of a childs face, and ending that child's life by moving his finger one inch, let poets write, artists paint, singers sing. The evil and irony that the word 'sight' can mean to look closely and see, and also to center a target for destruction, is precisely the ambiguity and tragedy of human life and language that perhaps the poet captures best.
Levertov's famous essay, and her book of the title, 'The Poet in the World' is a manifesto for engagement, involvement, commitment and an existential even visceral protest against all such inhumane practices. But, however inhumane, it is nevertheless a human being who pulls the trigger – and that is the tragedy of evil that has to be addressed, and by human beings who will not despair, will not be silent, and will not respond to such atrocity in kind.
Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison,
Kirie eleison.
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