Come Together: Imagine Peace

Flower, Peace

Come Together: Imagine Peace
Edited by Philip Metres, Ann Smith, and Larry Smith
Bottom Dog Press, 2008
205 pages, $18 (paperback)

Some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
vision on this dark earth, but I say it’s
The one you love most.
—Sappho (625–570 B.C.E.)

So sang Sappho, Greece’s “Tenth Muse,” declaring herself, if not antiwar, at least somewhat opposed to its glorification as practiced by most poets of her era, notably the (probably mythic) author of her culture’s epic, The Iliad.

Sappho’s slightly ambivalent assertion now stands at the beginning of Come Together: Imagine Peace, a new collection of 2,500 years’ worth of “peace poetry” edited by peace poets Philip Metres and Larry Smith and therapist Ann Smith.

The editors’ mission, they declare in the book’s introduction, was to bring “the dead and the living, poetic luminaries, prophetic firebrands, and quieter, more common voices into a chorus for peace.” To that end, they’ve gathered more than 130 poems ranging from Sappho’s fragment through works by 19th-century U.S. poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to 20th-century U.S. bards like Martin Espada, the late Audre Lorde, and poet-activist-priest Daniel Berrigan.

For readers’ convenience, the poems are grouped into eight sections, from works of earlier times through calls for action to poems of meditation and prayer. The categories, however, are arbitrary and not terribly useful. “Some Precedents,” for instance, contains old favorites like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s stirring “Conscientious Objector,” with its insistent, “I shall die, but that is all I will do for death/I am not on his payroll.” But the section also includes more recent works, such as excerpts from “State of Siege,” by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and the late June Jordan’s powerful “The Bombing of Baghdad,” linking the first Gulf War and the U.S. war against Native Americans:

And this is for Crazy Horse singing as he dies
because I live inside his grave
And this is for the victims of the bombing of Baghdad
because the enemy traveled from my house
to blast your homeland
into pieces of children
into pieces of sand

The strength of this relatively slim book is its rich mix of depictions of war’s horrors with hopes, prayers, and guides to actions for peace. There are omissions, of course. Among the missing are the bitter antiwar poets of the World War I era, like the United States’ E.E. Cummings and England’s Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen (especially Owen’s searing “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the counter to “the old lie” that declared it “sweet and fitting” to die for one’s country).

But all cavils aside, it’s useful, inspiring, and, in times like these, healing for pacifists and antiwar activists to have collected in one volume the poems that are included. We need them, like this one that comes almost at the end of the book—Dan Berrigan’s “Prayer for the Morning Headlines,” with its final, hopeful incantation: