Peace Signs Carried by Poets at the March to End the War in Iraq - January 27, 2007
Mind your saviors I say/ and/ thank God our fields are full of
potatoes and not oil!
-- Roseleen Walsh, Belfast Ireland
With so much power, the hardest thing is not to kill.
-- Aleksandr Kerensky
A thousand times, in a thousand days
Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…
may this
be the last of your sorrows.
-- Francesco Levato
Oh, isn't it enough?
What does a man need more than a loaf of bread,
a quiet night
and an armful of bleak love?
-- Farideh Hasanzadeh, Iran
There's no gap or break
in the ranks of those marching
under the hill:
an endless line of dying men
coming on and on and on....
-- Saigyô (1128-1190)
Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
-- Flannery O'Connor, writer
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
-- Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
The sleep of reason breeds monsters.
-- Francisco Goya, Artist
Our
cities decay
as foreign nations become our own.
-- Barbara Strasko
I am but a raindrop,
in a pool of blood.
I am a leaf,
in a raging flood.
-- Mejita
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
-- George Bernard Shaw
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing;
that to win a war is as disastrous
as to lose one!
-- Agatha Christie
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered
the common people starved.
Among the conquerors
the common people starved too.
-- Bertolt Brecht
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy…..
and liars in public places
-- Ezra Pound
O! Heedless Generals of the parading troops…
I shall keep crying aloud, at the top of my voice,
Though my tongue is plucked out of the roots.
-- Muhammad Shanazar, Pakistan
In the republic of poetry,
the guard at the airport will not allow you to leave the country
until you declaim a poem for her
and she says Ah! Beautiful.
-- Martín Espada
If you are required to kill someone today,on the promise of a
political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow,
believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide,
too.
-- Katherine Anne Porter
Among the conquered
the common people starved.
Among the conquerors
the common people starved too.
-- Bertolt Brecht
Many men died—although we know the fate
Of none, nor of anyone, and the war
Goes on,
and the moon in the breast of man is cold.
-- John Berryman
What passing-bells for these who die like cattle? Only the monstrous
anger of the guns.
--Wilfred Owen, WWI poet
My body and your sword the bloody dialog of freedom.
-- Jama Juma'h, Iraqi poet
Who gathers the scattered limbs? Restores the hand to the child's body
and that breast to the mother who?
-- Abdul-Karim al-Qasid, Iraqi poet
We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere
-- Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet living in Lebanon.
Or is America, born yesterday,
indulging in child's play with my venerable country?
-- Abdul-Rassaq al Rubai, Iraqi poet
My son smells of peace when I lean over him. It isn't just the soap.
Everybody was once the child with the smell of peace.
-- Yehuda Amichai, Israeli Poet
For the poor die twice,
defending two countries:
poverty and their master's land.
-- Mamdouh Udwan, Syrian Poet
Friend, the night has slain the moon.
In the mirror of my face you can find no shelter
only my country's disfigured face.
-- Fadwa Tuqan, Palestinian Poet
all born in the shadow of bombs
Shall become bombs
-- Rashid Husain, Palestinian Poet
Every soldier's grave a place
Too loud for sleep.
-- E. Ethelbert Miller
A poet is the gardener and the blight, poetry is beauty and dissent.
-- Scott Ecksel
We read our poems of resistance. We know we will be marching
forever.
-- Sarah Browning
I sleep in full solidarity with the targeted, Who…somehow cradle a
small light of hope.
-- Dan Vera
A part of us vanishes each day.
-- Adam Chiles
Chrysanthemums... what is real and what is imagined... the size of
grief, its ruin.
-- Grace Cavalieri
We thrash, curse for air
As our strangler declares, look
how violent the Arab.
-- Zein El-Amine
Ravaged animals
creep, bleeding,
from the once-green world.
-- Ellen Wise
Sorry. Can't just wait
on Jesus. I have to fight
here, right now.
Love you
-- Esther Iverem
all war is extortion
--Sam Hamill
My sweet, sweet love, today they bombed this place.
On the news I saw an eight-year-old digging graves.
-- Christi Kramer
The bombers fly so close you feel their engines in your chest
though none can say where they're headed or why
-- Melissa Tuckey
The war of this place taught him that homeland's concrete
and foreign soil are mixed with the same hard sand.
-- Fred Joiner
Photo by Ben Browning
Read about the poets contingent at the September 24, 2005, demonstration!
Read about our past events.
Note: To inquire about having DC Poets Against the War read at your event or collaborate on a project, please contact Melissa at: melissa.dcpaw@gmail.com |
