Peace March

He had thought he might, this time, march
though when he reached the park and found the ibis

had been forced to take refuge in the trees,
when he heard the usual speakers making peace

into politics, he went off to find a coffee shop.
As soon as it began to move, he edged his way

into what his Prime Minister would later call the mob
and walked, watching how the city's tall buildings eye

each other off and keeping to himself those pieces of quiet
that now and then fell from the thick cuts of noise.

He did not, as instructed, cry against
the air: “NO WAR! NO WAR!”

Later that week, seeing anti-war protesters trash the coffee shop,
he wondered if he'd made a mistake. Their hands were clenched.

Peace, because it is a work of open hands, must always be powerless
before those who think, whatever they think, that power is the same as force.

I have just three things to teach, said Lao-Tzu,
simplicity, patience, and compassion.

When war begins, patience and simplicity have ways to survive:
to make a battle plan; to praise a guided missile's clean into the air curve.

Compassion, since it cannot keep the enemy in sight, dies
along with the pregnant woman carrying her suicide bomb.

The children scrambling out of Basra 's scraps do not understand this.
Because their hands are as stretched and empty as their guts,

they do not dream how dangerous they are, carrying pity like
a virus that might easily infect an army and a television audience.

The anti-war riot made the headlines. His peace march had received
hardly a mention, coming after bombs, burning, and the cricket score.

For some reason he finds himself remembering the ibis.
After the invaders had gone they would have sighed down

beside their bins to investigate whatever scraps were left behind.
Their survivor necks would have been stretching, almost like hands.

[Noel Rowe is Australian. This poem is from his Next to Nothing (Vagabond Press, Sydney , 2004.)]

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