Peace Is a Woman and a Mother

How do you know
peace is a woman?
I know, for
I met her yesterday
on my winding way
to the world's fare.
She had such a sorrowful face
just like a golden flower faded
before her prime.

I asked her why
she was so sad?
She told me her baby
was killed in Auschwitz,
her daughter in Hiroshima
and her sons in Vietnam,
Ireland, Israel, Lebanon,
Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya.

All the rest of her children, she said,
are on the nuclear
black-list of the dead,
all the rest, unless
the whole world understands -
that peace is a woman.

A thousand candles then lit
in her starry eyes, and I saw -
Peace is indeed a pregnant woman,
Peace is a mother.

A Bridge of Peace

"They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,
and none shall make them afraid." (Micah, 4, 4)

My Arab sister,
Let us build a sturdy bridge
From your olive world to mine,
From my orange world to yours,
Above the boiling pain
Of acid rain prejudice -
And hold human hands high
Full of free stars
Of twinkling peace.

I do not want to be your oppressor
You do not want to be my oppressor,
Or your jailer
Or my jailer,
We do not want to make each other afraid
Under our vines
And under our fig trees
Blossoming on a silvered horizon
Above the bruising and the bleeding
Of Poison gases and scuds.

So, my Arab sister,
Let us build a bridge of
Jasmine understanding
Where each shall sit with her baby
Under her vine and under her fig tree -
And none shall make them afraid
AND NONE SHALL MAKE THEM AFRAID.

Cosmic Woman

They tell us
you were first born
in warm ocean womb
caressed by sun fingers -
daughter perhaps
of the stormy love
of two unruly atoms
maddened by the solitude
of eternal rounds
in the steppes of times

And your children,
lively descendants
of their stellar nucleus mother
dropped from the sky
in depths of ocean belly,
born of green and brown seaweed
and the laughs and cries
of a blue bacteria

Cosmic woman,
when you chose earth
as home for your vast roots
at the beginning
of the great human family,
it was for life -
not for death.
Cosmic woman,
you, who were born of the nucleus,
from deadly nuclear mushroom
Save your children
SAVE YOUR CHILDREN.

Woman of No Time

I am the woman
Who has no time,

I envy those who have
They envy me for having none.

My desire is to plant forests
But I only manage shrubs,

I want to run one million races
When I barely manage one.

Yet I know I'm not a fly born in the summer dawn
And dead in the afternoon,

My day is a pomegranate
Full of ruby grains -

Time must be my friend!
Stopping me from tasting them all at once
So I can enjoy them one by one.