To Make a Peace between Us

May we stop for just one moment, may we cease in our endless, campaign?

Rest your hands at your sides, let your words run silent and breathe, listen,

Look in through the windows of your eyes and see. Are we now so much different?

Have we not both come struggling and striving into such light and airy madness,

And sucked the raw, sweet air and wailed our life into the chaos and void?

Is this not enough to make a peace between us, to make a bond, a love?

We are the dreams of so many loves, the dreams that went wild and moaning into the night,

Their voices ringing back to all the voices, all the dreams, all the dreamers,

Casting the essence of their bodies like whispers into the soft eternal night,

Casting seeds of dreams into the warm and wet flesh of earth, hoping,

Dreaming to one day see them flourish, to one day see us, growing full, ripe and glistening.

Is this not enough to make a peace between us, to make a bond, a love?

You standers before altars and platforms, pulpits and mirrors, you preachers and professors all,

Why have you not been saying this, been teaching and telling it, crying it,

With every breath, every voice, every written and spoken word? Stand ashamed.

Instead you took up sides, took up arms, words and suspicions sharper than knives,

You estranged my family with every jagged breath, cut deep at the bonds between,

Brothers and sisters who’ve forgotten their roots in the kindreds of all the earth.

You sowed seeds of division from every high place, planted thorns in every row.

You opened the gates for wolves and fed your flocks upon dark and bitter herbs.

Have you forgotten in your hatred and fear that we rise from the same strong branch?

One family, one people, in the long, broad house of the earth. We are kindred,

You and I, strong sons and beautiful daughters of so many deep dreams.

Put away your dusty books of old grievances, cast away your haste to be right.

You dig up old graves to gnaw at the mummified bones of old quarrels.

Let the dead rest alone and rise from the dusty lips of old coffins.

Forget your ledgers of sadness and tallies of such dark pain. Count rather your children,

Gather them close, recall their names, look into their bright eyes and smooth faces.

Are they so much different from my own? May they never know war or hunger or violence.

May they grow tall and strong, slender and beautiful. May they dream the dreams,

Of earth and water and sky, and know peace all the days of their lives.

May our children know each other differently than what we gave them,

May they always have a peace between them, a bond, a love.

Eric M. Petit