{"id":3462,"date":"2013-08-12T08:52:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T13:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/?page_id=3462"},"modified":"2014-01-23T13:40:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T19:40:34","slug":"burden-of-peace-2000","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/mac-gimse\/burden-of-peace-2000\/","title":{"rendered":"Burden of Peace, 2000"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"burden\"<\/p>\n

BEARING THE BURDEN OF PEACE<\/strong><\/p>\n

St. Olaf College Nobel Peace Prize Forum, February, 2000
\nSculpture and poetry by mac gimse
\nFor Norwegian Nobel Peace Co-laureates David Trimble and John Hume.<\/em><\/p>\n

The delicate transition between conception and birth is the beginning of BEARING THE BURDEN OF PEACE. One side of this bronze shows a woman holding the heavy burden of her pregnant stomach anticipating child-birth. Mothers feel deep despair when, with or without a choice, they lose a child anywhere from the pre-natal state to maturity.
\nViewed from the other side a young man holds up a child who emerges from the woman’s head, imaging her labor complete and her dream fulfilled. Once a child is born, it becomes vulnerable to the outside world, to war, famine, poverty and abuse. Every country in the world faces the need to provide its children with nutrition, stability, and community, which are our continuing burdens of peace.
\nBEARING THE BURDEN OF PEACE is meant to be touched and even passed from person to person so that everyone will see the image, feel the forms and experience the weight of passing the BURDEN OF PEACE piece.<\/p>\n

\n

BEARING THE BURDEN OF PEACE<\/strong>
\nby Mac Gimse<\/p>\n

If peace is a form of\u00a0ultimate human understanding<\/strong>,
\nbefore I pass into the heart of God\u2019s surrounding,
\nI want to plunge my head into the seas of language
\nand drink from every tongue only the words of kindness
\nWith the taste of love in my mouth
\nI want to whisper silence on wars of shouting
\nat children of abuse, on races from hatred,
\nbetween embittered genders,
\nwithin unholy religions, and by angered nations.<\/p>\n

If peace is death, as in\u00a0rest in peace<\/strong>,
\nbefore I lie down underground – to cease,
\nI want to swaddle myself in unfamiliar clothing
\nand nestle into the smell of fresh-dug earth
\nnext to the stones and bones of forgotten peoples.
\nThen I want to run my fingers through the silt of their sorrows
\nand quench their mourning thirst for those innocents
\nwho were shed on never-again fields for letting blood.<\/p>\n

If peace is\u00a0kindled in progeny<\/strong>,
\nbefore I garland my soul in bouquets of eternity,
\nI want to spill my seeds of final begetting
\ninto the roots of the mercy tree, from which hangs
\nthe last un-Christly corpse of human harm,
\nand, for the yet unborn, I want to feel their blood
\nflowing through my flanks that soak tomorrow,
\nin the deep red, ages past of all our origins.<\/p>\n

If peace is\u00a0tradition-passing<\/strong>,
\nbefore I give up my most prized possessions
\nof hair and teeth, of flesh and breath,
\nbefore I let go of hoards of family and hugs of friends,
\nI want to squeeze my soul through the martyr\u2019s throat
\nto feel words of compassion as spoken by the lips of mercy:<\/p>\n

If I \u201clove my neighbor as myself,\u201d there can be peace on earth.
\nThen I want to flood the world with the sweet sounds
\nof bearing the burden of peace
\nusing YOUR impressions, not just my own,
\nof how and why we lived.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BEARING THE BURDEN OF PEACE St. Olaf College Nobel Peace Prize Forum, February, 2000 Sculpture and poetry by mac gimse For Norwegian Nobel Peace Co-laureates David Trimble and John Hume. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":209,"featured_media":0,"parent":3437,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3462","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/209"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3462\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}