#peacepoetry A collaborative poem by Sandile Ngidi and Yuri Kageyama March 2022 ~ May 2022

Sandile

We are crushed still, bulldozed, uneasy.

Give bread, paska, borscht now.

Sink the molten nerves, war hormones.

Pray fair winds, pebbles, sumac delights.

Rachel Corrie flowers, Westbank’s red ruins.

Yuri

Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s back,

Silent chants, red smoke, orphans cry.

Blue and yellow flurry on Tokyo streets,

“We stand with Ukraine.”  

Fissions of fear, hypersonic glide.

Kent State My Lai Mariupol

Akiko Yosano tells us: Mountains will move,

Shuddering dark loins, tangled hair to lips.

Sandile

Stoop, Russians, stoop,

War dogs eat death you planted in the fields.

Spit its blood like wastewater.

Smear the gunpowder to sanctify your sword.

But no gun can kill the hills’ brooding smiles,

Butterflies will survive the heavy rains.

Yuri

When “tactical” dwarfs Hiroshima, Nagasaki,

“Neo-Nazi” is not a name for anyone,

Retreat sends an attack more frenzied than ever.

Poets speak above the silence,

Purify the Meaninglessness

Of words gone Mad.

Sandile

This ominous cloud

Racial hate in sniper fire.

Your fresh light

Brave in stunning pearls.

Still stubborn as our knees.

Your tenacious love,

Shireen Abu Aqleh.

Vibrant in the storms of black powder rains.

Black stones.

Red shrines.

Coral noctilucence.

Yuri

Children in Ukraine and Fukushima

Are sick with thyroid cancer,

More than the usual two in a million.

She cries remembering that day a decade ago,

When doctors tell her you’ll die at 23 without surgery,

“I was wearing a new dress and new sandals.”