Love In a World At War

Love In a World At War

Astounding me, this morning
time split like a lazy atom
drifted across an emerald creek —
to open my chaotic orchid being
to the force of life, again, again
the long breathless passion
of it rasping out of a first shriek
shuddering toward a distant,
shimmering arc.

I have my mother's hands
and these are Father's words.
The child who just lept into water
for the first time
is part of me, and the grackle
sipping at the water's edge —

I am astonished
by the long, threadbare tenacity of life,
born of every kind of touching
and I wonder how
human beings fall to battle
invent bombs to drop on hospitals
how at the height of annihilation
when we are numb from outrage
life asserts itself like rain, peace blooms
anywhere and someone rests alongside
a water fall, in a golden slant of light
on an October afternoon, or
dives into an emerald creek.

Every instant contains every other one
and we float thick with awe
across the fierce and holy face of time
so that when life radiates to every corner of
our world — green and insistent,
against the brute force
of a world flat crazy,
we know love is both possible
and the essential fact
in the quickening of time and mud
we call home.

©Susan Bright, 2008




Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.


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