Poems of Peace: Andre Demers, "The Umbrella of Peace"

The Umbrella of Peace 

Lips smile and laugh, but the heart does not forgive,

And patiently resentment broods till time

Presents the vulnerable hated neck,

And then by insult or by blade we draw

The blood we crave. This is the way it is

With individuals as with their states,

As states are persons in their sovereignty,

Wholes that are part of some much greater whole,

Young and unwise as is humanity,

But one at last, if we can will it so.

The wound of human nature ever heals,

And there is never an end to its growing pains;

What may assuage the festering of it

Must be a kind of cautery, agonizing

And yet too necessary to forgo.

Some say the only real medicine is

The deluge or the comet, or the wrath

Of God in some more obviously intentional

Agent of doom, such as by our own hands,

And the tools and weapons that extend them well,

Too well, too well, at least in certain ways,

As every weapon might become a tool,

And every state have reactors yet no bombs,

As every tool is a potential weapon,

From shovels to cash. Who gives their power up?

Who says, in the great struggle of survival,

I lay down the holy right to kill to live?

Only a perfect fool, a waking dreamer

As brave as she's naive. Sweet suicides,

Dream on, of the utopia where we might

Realize the ideals impossible of yore.

It is the hour before the long midnight,

As it has always been for each lone thing

That lives on this old world its little span,

Mayflies or dinosaurs or mastodons,

Mammoths or sabretooths or human beings,

But now we have the power to kill the earth

That gives tomorrow its lustrous hope, and we,

As always, exceed the cruelty of nature,

And worship death and fear unconsciously.

The kingdom of heaven within waits to exude;

The standing armies wait for Christ to come,

To say, "You may sit down, your work is done,

And all Earth's lands are yours and are no one's."

They wait so patiently... they love their guns.