Peace Signs Carried by Poets at the March

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