Seeking Peace

 

Walk for Peace photo

Everything is beautiful,
and I am so sad.*

Where to find peace in difficult times?

It's in a line of monks in orange robes,

walking across America for peace and compassion:

their quiet hearts, their smiles, their fingers
raised in blessing.

It's in the sunrise rising up over Rosie Bay,

in the crows strutting along the beach,

turning over shells, looking for their breakfast.

Everything is beautiful*
 and then I turn on the news,
speechless at the illegality, the inhumanity,
the cruel brutality,
yet also lifted up
by the voices of good people
fighting to uphold the rule of law.

Then, I have to
disappear, like a hermit,
into the forest,
to listen to the trees
breathing peace.
What we save, saves us,
I read somewhere,
and it is true.
The trees fill me with their peace,
and I emerge transformed,
renewed, restored.

I have carried beauty and sorrow
in equal measure
through the length
of my old age,
watching the world I love
fall apart.

We turn from scenes we never dreamed
we'd see

on the streets of North America:
an angry, ugly boil that has festered
and broken open.

I walk, like the monks,
intentionally,

to find some peace, and there she is -

a fox, where there has never been
a fox before -

peering from the thicket
- not alarmed, not running off -

just looking, as if to ponder what manner

of beast we humans are, to make so much noise

and clamour and distress on lands

meant for peace and plenty,
for beauty and for joy.

I carry the forest's peace
with me as I leave.
When the clamour is too great
it is the wild
that helps me grieve.

The fox sighting was by a friend, not me. But she sent me the photo and I put her sweet face into this poem.

***The italicized lines are from Mark Nepo's poem "Adrift".

A slight adjustment to last Friday's poem, for Susan's prompt at What's Going On - Peace.

What's going on indeed - things I never dreamed would happen this close to home. In Canada, we are appalled - and nervous.