Ronald Ross, 'The Death of Peace'

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The Death of Peace

PEACE
Now slowly sinks the day-long labouring Sun
Behind the tranquil trees and old church-tower;
And we who watch him know our day is done;
For us too comes the evening—and the hour.

The sunbeams slanting through those ancient trees,
The sunlit lichens burning on the byre,
The lark descending, and the homing bees,
Proclaim the sweet relief all things desire.

Golden the river brims beneath the west,
And holy peace to all the world is given;
The songless stockdove preens her ruddied breast;
The blue smoke windeth like a prayer to heaven.

O old, old England, land of golden peace,
Thy fields are spun with gossameres of gold,
And golden garners gather thy increase,
And plenty crowns thy loveliness untold.

By sunlight or by starlight ever thou
Art excellent in beauty manifold;
The still star victory ever gems thy brow;
Age canot age thee, ages make thee old.

Thy beauty brightens with the evening sun
Across the long-lit meads and distant spire:
So sleep thou well—like his thy labour done;
Rest in thy glory as he rests in fire.

But even in this hour of soft repose
A gentle sadness chides us like a friend—
The sorrow of the joy that overflows,
The burden of the beauty that must end.

( And from the fading sunset comes a cry... )

Michael Brownstein, 'My Period Of Desperation (Degradation)'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

My Period Of Desperation (Degradation)

I thought we were better than this,
the Holocaust wet paint over fresh plaster,
the bloody fluids cleansed, debris and bone raked away.
Then I read a passage in Carolyn Forche’s book,
Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, and everything I knew,
believed I knew, believed in, believed about me,
my people’s history, scattered like the flight of pigeons before a hawk.
You try to ignore it, but a scab does not form nor a scar,
just an everyday breaking of flesh, a reopening of wounds.
There are not enough stitches in the world to keep all of it intact—
so you give in (I gave in) and the pursuit to truth begins:

1.
I am human first, Judaism my religion—
not my ethnicity, my skin color, my nationality.
I never saw myself a Zionist, but I was proud of Israel,
her history my history, a piece of my identity,
a rendering of facts, the rule of Torah.
You sleep and when you wake, there is power to a myth.

2.
To the victor goes the writing of history,
the rewriting, even a creation of fiction.
1948: The famous Israeli War of Independence
and truths associated with it covered up.
What did happen to the Palestinian people?
The indigenous people? How did their villages vanish?
Were they destroyed in fire and bomb or simply
stolen from them and made a gift to someone else?

3.
There are always “ifs” in a rendering of history
and many sides to the same tale, even the same fiction.
The atrocities of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict—
The Nakba—have been documented, photographed,
displayed and archived—and still
the great myth of Israel’s beginnings persist--

By Michael Brownstein