International Peace Day: September 21

The theme of the United Nations International Peace Day 2009 is "We Must Disarm." It's focus is on the true costs and dangers of nuclear weapons.



Click this link for an ecumenical prayer service resource (pictured above), written from a Christian perspective by Marlette Black, PBVM. You're free to download and reproduce it to celebrate International Peace Day.

This reading from that service honors the poets, making it a fitting tribute to The Peace Tree's Poetryman:

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out,

‘The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster.

Peace, not only the absence of war.'

But peace, like a poem,

Is not there ahead of itself,

Can't be imagined before it is made,

Can't be known except in the words of its making,

Grammar of justice,

Syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

Dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

Until we begin to utter its metaphors,

Learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

If we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

Revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

Questioned our needs, allowed long pauses...

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

On that different fulcrum; peace, a presence, an energy field more intense than war,

Might pulse then,

Stanza by stanza into the world,

Each act of living

One of its words, each word

A vibration of light-facets

Of the forming crystal.

--Denise Levertov

Letter to Representative Michelle Bachmann

Michelle Bachmann thinks prayer and fasting will “help” defeat health-care reform.

Representative Bachmann,
Is it your prayer that comforts those dying in Iraq as they pray to Allah?

Is it your pleading lips that stave off any future Afghan deaths?

Do you purse your lips and launch one up for those suffering on other continents?

For those convicted of a crime, have you a prayer?

Do you beseech God to help those without health-care?

Was it your prayer, as well,
that had our national guard killing and dying in Iraq
as Katrina threw down her watery hell?

Is it your prayer that lifts the spirit of a widow or fatherless child
that they might resist shattering themselves against empire?

Is it your request that brings food to the starving and medicine to the sick?

Is it your prayer that the unborn are saved, but not a death row convict?

Step back for a moment and you’ll see you’ve been dim sighted;
All your sanctimonious pleas and prayers have gone unrequited.

Perhaps, instead of playing to and praying with your feral base,
you should do the job you were elected to do in the first place...

Sincerely,
Mark R. Prime
(thepoetryman)