Peace (January 21)

~ Peace ~

source

Do you create or live in peace? 

Is it interior? exterior?

alone? at home? in a group? in the world?

In a new poem, please describe the peace you envision for this new year or longer.  Or describe the peace you experience(d)in your life.  I'd love to experience it along with you.  

(Since I wrote this prompt, my country invaded Venezuela.  Can we still focus on peace?)

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

On the one-ton temple bell
Yosa Buson

On the one-ton temple bell A moon moth, folded into sleep, Sits still. 

Making Peace

By Denise Levertov

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.

Please link one poem that is your response to this prompt.  

After you link your poem, please visit others,

and

Don't forget to include this link in your post.