A little about “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov

In a dream, someone said to me: Be carful of what you draw.  Don’t shoot the horses.  It got me to thinking about metaphor, about anger, and about social media.  And about this poem by Levertov (copied from the Poetry Foundation, published in her book by the same title by New Directions).  We feel desperate in these times to connect with others who share our anger and fear about the environment, about corporations mattering more than people, about being enslaved to keep the top 1% in this Country rich.  We want so badly to have our voices heard about the injustice being done to the black community, the immigrants, the poor, women, the transgendered, the LGBT community, the incarcerated, the mentally ill….and on and on….We are living in a time when all we fought for is being threatened….when the consciousness of the culture is being pulled, indeed ripped back to the old days of racism, sexism, ageism, all the isms… Social media feeds our need for belonging and sharing our angers and fears around this movement backward and this violent assault on our life’s work….building safe and just communities, a safe and just world.  But social media can also be turned against us and fuel the divides…. I want to think deeply, envision my world goals…. This poem speaks to that.  I want to listen for the metaphors we desperately need…I do not want to shoot the horses….

Making Peace 

A voice from the dark called out,

‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

by Denise Levertov