STRIVING FOR PEACE: SOWING THE SEEDS OF JUSTICE
Nobel Peace Prize Forum, St. Olaf College, 1994.
…on Wings of Freedom
Sculpture and poetry by mac gimse
For Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum
We can still make PEACE
with our neighbors who surround us,
while voices of children mingle joy
with sirens of a distant sadness.
Infants call us with their cradled cries
to tell us we must heed their future.
Their dream of PEACE is bourne for all to share,
while we declare that freedom is a sheltered place,
a protected toil, an unviolated space.
OUR ease in OUR bodies in OUR lifetime.
What we truly seek lies beyond our bodies,
beyond the coursing of our ethnic blood,
beyond the narrow vision of a homeland
that is no longer home, nor ours.
Rather, people come from everywhere
to join us at our table.
Figures of the exiled,
the homeless, the dissidents,
wait for us as global patriots
to light our wind-blown candle.
The seamless sky
between my person and yours
dissolves into un-scrubbed ozone
and our freedom to be silent has ended.
Is MY dream of PARADISE the same as YOURS?
Overnight I yearn to burst my bubble of extravagance,
wash away tarnished histories,
empty pockets of oppression,
shake out tatters of poverty,
and de-sanctify holy wars.
My dream of paradise is here, within what I touch or torture.
My paradise is in the midst of our collective wills,
inside our new and necessary way of life.
Words from every language speak
with density of demands:
Our minds are traveling everywhere
at cyber-net speeds, into…
Disorder
dust
Disorder
dust…
So comes our need for web-power, land-power, war-power,
where no one can tally the gains or losses.
Is POW-WAR our only sound for freedom?
The newest atmosphere is full of weapons of the will
unleashed by silent affirmation,
while you and I go about our pre-assigned tasks.
Dissonant voices make up stories: “Life is ending!
We are dying! The world is coming undone!”
I feel exposed, I need courage to mingle
with your values, other doctrines, distant beliefs.
YOU are my next great mystery,
posing as the last living person who has a gentle voice to say,
“If anyone survives, it will be the humble
who are concerned more about others than themselves.”
What do we ask of people winged with good fortune?
We ask for their wealth in exchange for poverty,
their order in trade for chaos,
their safety as insurance against
the world’s greatest risk:
The right of each of us to live free from human harm!
Epitaphs say, “they” are no more real than “we,”
and “we” are ordinary people, who have no business
doing anything but to grasp our mutual freedoms:
…from barriers of color and gender and nation,
…from separating economies and polities,
…from partitions of creeds and prayers,
…from fences of faith and family to fight through.
We piece together our breakable hearts to proclaim:
“This is not the final act!” Do you believe me?
Voices without gender speak in waking wisdom:
“As we give mercy, we shine brighter than we see,
as we seek justice, we rise cleaner than we feel.”
The cries of children penetrate our garden
to plead for fingertips to raise them up,
to embrace the despirited,
to hold the huddled lost,
those who seek our shores on rafts of chance,
who otherwise will disappear
before they reach our dwindling fires.
Comforters come from exile,
released from pain and freed from silence.
They sing a song for all of us to join:
“This is the cradle of our common bourning,
the sphere of our finite journey.
ON WINGS OF FREEDOM, we are becoming
one children who struggle to see,
a future of peace in our own awakening,
claimed by all to be free!”
mac gimse