Wildpeace, Yehuda Amichai

Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness.

I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.

A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam.

A little rest for the wounds— who speaks of healing?

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.)

Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.

Camoflauging the Chimera, Yusef Komunyaaka

We tied branches to our helmets.

We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank, blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off

the river, slow-dragging with ghosts from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America.

We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal, till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk wrestling iron through grass.

We weren’t there. The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath, ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each man’s eyelid.

Andrea Gutierrez is the managing editor of the Bryan County News. Poems found on poetryfoundation.org.