We Are Waiting For Peace to Break Out

 -- for Marvin Simmons

We are waiting for peace to break out

We are waiting for flowers to bloom

We are waiting for the moon to come

from behind the black clouds of war

We are waiting for the light

We are waiting

and as we wait we sing songs of celebration

We are waiting

and as we wait we hold out our hands in love and friendship:

white hands extended in friendship to black hands

and brown and green hands of the earth

We are waiting

and while we wait we applaud those who have gone

      before us

preaching peace: all the Martin Luther Kings, all the 

    Gandhis...

We are waiting for peace to break out

and as we wait we dance: we dance with the cold east wind

with the creaking singing branches of giant firs

we dance with the devils

of dust and the angels of clouds

We are waiting

and as we wait we are learning the language

of burning roses and the sunflowers slowly turning 

    toward the sun

We are waiting for peace to break out

and while we wait we are learning to listen

to cries for mercy and cries for help

though we may not know the language

We are learning to listen for the arrival of doves

We are waiting for peace to break out 

and while we wait we are smiling at you

at all of you - at the you and the me in the mirror...

We are waiting for peace to break out 

We are waiting for buds to pop though it is deep winter

We wait for peace as patiently as the drop of water

on the lips at the mouth of the fountain

We wait knowing the water of peace is cool and sweet 

sure that the crystal drop will fall on the earth 

in spite of any of man's evil actions --

 -- Carlos Reyes [Jan Reitsma]

II. The Mermaid (from The Sea Cabinet)

 Between the imaginary iceberg an the skeletal whale

is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case, 

the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale

so unlike Herbert Draper's siren dreams, loose 

on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.

Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face

look more like P.T. Barnum's Freak of Feejee,

piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.

She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey

the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair

of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips

open to reveal her sea-carved mouth, her rare

ivory mermaid-teeth.  Children breathe and rap

on the glass to make her move. In her fixity

she's as far as can be from the selkie who slips

her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney

and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light, 

discarding the stuffed sack of her body.

Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight

she echoes the numb roll of the whale

in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought

no beast could be as nerveless as the whale. 

-- Caitriona O'Reilly

[Pia, 2022]