Peace is a Verb

No passive meal, no rare stuff bird,
true peace is not a noun, but verb;
inaction, apathy and doubt
that whisper are not her. She shouts

from rooftops, making foul war shake
in fear at her approach. Mistake
not mewling whiners for her knights,
but rather find those awake nights

who seek to change first, in themselves,
the hurt and violence that dwells
inside us all, and is expressed
in hatred’s cruel unhappiness.

Peace is no victim, she just waits
while we excuse or blame on fate
why we act not who know the course
that will alone deter blind force:

to cease rewarding strength and might
for its own sake, calling it right
that those who kill and those who die
are somehow not just you and I.

11 AUG 2006

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War and Peace

If you are angry about violence,
hate the war-mongers who destroy and kill,
use guilt as a weapon for innocence,
you may think to win, but you never will.

Because these tools that you use are the same
that you rally against. To shout speeches
filled full with such rage is to play the game
you claim to despise. For true peace preaches

to end all vitriol and harsh attack:
an absence of malice against perceived
enemies; its purpose is to give back –
not belittle or shame. You are deceived

if you think fighting changes the system;
all it does is make you look just like “them”.

23 JUL 2003

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Today’s Potent (Seed) Thought

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make wars…The philosophy that rationalizes war and military training is always (whatever the official religion of the politicians and war makers) some wildly unrealistic doctrine of national, racial or ideological idolatry, having, as its inevitable corollaries, the notions of Herrenvolk* and “the lesser breeds without the Law.”
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

* Translation from German: “Nation of the Masters”

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