Come Together: Imagine Peace (Harmony)
What strikes me now, with our nation still mired in two wars, is how much our own self-argument can come to silence us, and how we can become victims of our own narratives of despair. The poems of Come Together: Imagine Peace remind us that, though the work of peacemaking is never done, andthough we face the most powerful forces in the world, we are not alone, and our voices bear the burden of the silenced throughout the globe....The work of peacemaking, and the work of peace poetry, is at least in part to give voice to those small victories--where no blood was spilled, but lives were changed, justice was won, and peace was forged, achieved, or found. And words bring us there, to the brink of something new. Peace poetry is larger than a moral injunction against war; it is an articulation of the expanse, the horizon where we might come together. To adapt a line by the Sufi poet Rumi: "Beyond the realm of good and evil, there is a field."   -from the "Introduction" by Philip Metres (September 2008)