The largest poetry anthology ever created online, Poets Against War, now archives over 20,000 poems. Poet Sam Hamill created the site in 2003. Hamill, a pacifist, was invited by Laura Bush to participate in a symposium celebrating poetry and the American voice.
Aware the war with Iraq was imminent, Hamill contacted other poets to "reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam...to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend your names to our petition against this war”.
Within 4 days 1,500 poets acknowledged his call, a response that led to the creation of this website .An invitation by Marcy Kapturs to present poems to Representatives of Congress led to their inclusion in the Congressional Record.
A sample of the work collected by Poets Against War follows below:
becoming one
…slowly
we are becoming one:
it may take a long time yet
it took a long time to shed some of our skin
but slowly we are all becoming
one…
unity is against what diminishes us
as humans
slowly…
we will reach all the parts that threaten us…
slowly
we’ll cross the rivers, and the oceans…
slowly they will become like us
or we
like them
we will shed more skin
shed religion
shed language
shed prejudice
to find the common soul in all of us…
slowly,
find out the biggest differences
that draw the borders between us
big properties
big chairs with big walls around them
big body guards, call them what you will
who blindly guard unjustified-
unshared money
mistaking it for flag and nationality,
slowly,
we’ll realize we have to be faster
and wiser,
cause we don’t have much more time to lose
before they point a finger to someone
before they create another enemy…
we’ll turn our gaze into ourselves
to find that unseen enemy,
slowly,
we’ll find out
that somebody
left an army in our hearts
and somebody has been feeding them
instead of us.
slowly,
reaching their doorstep
we’ll say no
enough of the fake dreams
we are all awake now
fully
and absolutely awake
slowly
we are all becoming one.
Zeki Ali
(Kyrenia, North Cyprus, 5/31/05)
gingerivers
posted with permission ©2005 Poets Against War
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3 comments:
Ginger, I remember this project. In fact, I believe I down-loaded a version of it way back when. Good to see things are still going strong with it.
Helm.
yea, good post. thanks for the info.
I visit the Poets Against War website frequently. They also published a print anthology titled Poets Against the War a couple of years ago which is just excellent (published, I believe, by The Nation Books).
A couple of my poems are posted in the Poets Against War website. If you're interested you can find them by going to the PAW site, click on the Poems link, and search by my name in their search function.
In their Poetry Matters/Links page, Poets Against War has included a link to an article of mine on "Political Poetry." I'll put a direct link to the article in a separate post in Cafe Cafe shortly.
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