Waging Peace:

From Voices Education

Waging Peace Now Available
It's International Peace Day and to commemorate it, we've produced an online book, Waging Peace.

The poems, narrative and artwork were contributed by you, our members!

Take a look at Waging Peace online or you can go to Lulu.com and purchase a hard copy of the book.

As noted in the introduction of Waging Peace, contributors are amateur and professional, young and older, representing multiple religions, ethnicities and geographic origins. This is our first venture in producing a collective work and we are thrilled with the response we have received, both from our contributors and from our members.

Such helpers in the world...

There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out. Like Mercy itself,
they run towards the screaming.

And they can't be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, "Why did you come
so quickly?" he or she would say, "Because I heard
your helplessness.

These words were written in the 13th century by the great Persian poet, Rumi. In the last week we have seen the cries of many Iranian people and most of us stand in solidarity with the people of Iran. The heated debate among our politicians will continue to rage about what we should say and what we should do as Iranians raise their voices. Though Rumi did not explicitly say it, my belief is that he implied that we should come as allies to stand next to the people of Iran, listening to their concerns and alert to their ideas and ready to do what they ask—not what we think they need......

The poems that follow...>>>>>

Voices Education Project

Inaugural Addresses & Presidential Poetry

We have a new curricula module ready for the historical inauguration of Barack Obama. Inauguration Speeches and Poetry offers activities that can be incorporated into the classroom but the material is for all our readers.

Read selected excerpts from past speeches and all of the poems commissioned to be read at the inauguration of U.S. presidents. The poetry section of the module includes poems written in honor of Obama's presidency by a number of U.S. writers including former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins.

Here's one from Derek Walcott:

Forty Acres

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving --
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's
receding rim --
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

Voices Education Project

Voices in Wartime

Two Poems.....

The following two poems were sent to a friend, a 'Nam brother, who has a now long running newsletter similar to the G.I. Anti-War movement newsletters of the 'Nam era found on bases, and In-Country ,around the world back than.

Gaza Has Become A Warsaw Ghetto

Palestinian child demonstrates against
the slaughter of her people.
Generation after generation after generation.
Like the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto,
three generations ago.
If the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust
could see what is now happening in Palestine,
they would stand in front of the Palestinians.
Why?
Because there is solidarity in the persecuted.
Gaza has become a Warsaw Ghetto.

Mike Hastie
Vietnam Veteran
December 31, 2008

This one comes from JM and She writes:

Something very different: a poem.
Have you heard of Erich Fried who is often referred to as the greatest modern, Jewish, poet?
He was born in Vienna in 1921 and escaped to England, with his mother, after his father was tortured to death by the Gestapo, in 1938.
Because of his experiences with racism and Fascism he became involved in the Palestinian cause.
He was a leader in the fight against both Fascism and Zionism.
I’m sending a copy of his best poem, in my opinion. It was first published in 1988 just before he died.
Please take the time to read it. I think it’s wonderful.

A Jew to Zionist Fighters, 1988

What do you actually want?
Do you really want to outdo
those who trod you down
a generation ago
into your own blood
and into your own excrement
Do you want to pass on the old torture
to others now
in all its bloody and dirty detail
with all the brutal delight of torturers
as suffered by your fathers?
Do you really want to be the new Gestapo
the new Wehrmacht
the new SA and SS
and turn the Palestinians
into the new Jews?
Well then I too want,
having fifty years ago
myself been tormented for being a Jewboy
by your tormentors,
to be a new Jew with these new Jews
you are making of the Palestinians
And I want to help lead them as a free people
into their own land of Palestine
from whence you have driven them or in which you plague them
you apprentices of the Swastika
you fools and changelings of history
whose Star of David on your flags
turns ever quicker
into that damned symbol with its four feet
that you just do not want to see
but whose path you are following today

Veterans Administration Dedication Rarely Mentioned

Many of us, especially Veterans who are Advocates for our brothers and sisters and those Civilians who join that advocacy, have been writing about the Veterans Administration and especially Veterans Care, which in these times of conflicts also encompass the Military Care system as well. With this technology we can push our advocacy untill it's paid the attention it should already have by those who do the job of reporting as a profession. And because of the extreme lack of oversight and concern by the representatives we hire, as the drums of war were first pounding and the years following, we find breaking stories far to often in these last months. Months that have brought out the problems with the care, the overwelming numbers needing care and being denied for months or just denied, the living conditions of those receiving the care and even serving, and so much more.

When we write about the needs or the lack oversight and funds we far to often, myself included though I try and remember in my rage, leave out the facts of the true dedication of the workers in the VA System. The workers, who like most of us working stiffs, give their all to the jobs and professions they perform and have to deal with what's lacking from the administrations, top on down, of these agencies. In the government that administration starts with the Executive Branch, the Congress, the Political Appointee's to head and the Political Appointee's they bring in, and Especially to the Governed, Us, who fight the costs needed or follow political ideology leadership if not wanted.

Every once in awhile a report will surface of that dedication within:

VA nurse pens book of poems

Drea Horton tends to America’s war wounded during the day and writes about them at night.

Like in the poem she wrote about "a young Joe" who cried in her arms in the Louis B. Stokes Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brecksville, Ohio, where she works:

"Anxiety and nightmares take turns taunting him
Scattered sand and ghosts visit almost every day
Substance abuse, PTSD; the diagnosis given to him
He cried as he told me this. He said do they know?"

The poem is included in Horton’s second book, "Her Stars and Stripes: A nurse's diary", published by Author House. It’s full of prayers and thoughts for the men and women who pass through those VA hospital halls where she has toiled for the past 10 years. Horton, 45, says she has been taking care of others since she was 7 years old and going to work with her mother, who was a nursing assistant.

"She had three girls," Horton said during a phone interview from her Akron, Ohio, home. "All of us are nurses now."

Nursing can be a frustrating life, she said, especially in VA hospitals.

"We have a lot of homeless veterans here," she said. "They came back from the war, got discharged and then couldn’t find a job. We patch them up, get them a place to live and do everything we can to get them back on their feet.

"But just a small percentage actually make it."

Like the Vietnam veteran who flagged her down for a ride to the hospital one day:

"On my way to work I stopped at a traffic light
There stood a man on the corner to the right
He was pushing a buggy full of his belongings
Looking for what I thought were cans …"

The vet needed a ride to the VA medical center. "In his travels he had injured his right hand," Horton wrote. She took him to the emergency room and handed him over to an on-duty nurse.

"He winked and smiled weakly at me
With all that pain in his hand
Thank you nurse, he said
For not passing me by like the others."

The book of poetry reads like a diary. It’s an accounting of the battlefield heroes who awaken in the middle of the night screaming at shadows and the men and women who care for them while trying to not get too close, too personal, lest they begin to share in their suffering.

"My heart bleeds
For my patients and their families
I store those memories in my heart …
Drying their tears;
While we cry only in our hearts."

Horton said she has self-published one other book of poetry and has several other manuscripts, including a novel, in the works. But "Her Stars and Stripes" was not planned.

"It just happened," she said. "I started writing a poem about the bond formed between a nurse and a wounded soldier and suddenly saw I had 11 poems completed about these heroes."

Horton said she wanted to give human faces to the veterans and the people who care for them.

"We read in the papers about someone being wounded and then never hear about them again. This book is about what happens next," she said. "We nurses become their mothers, their sisters, their families. When they’re crying, we’re there holding and rocking them.

"We’re not supposed to cry. We were taught in school not to cry, to be their stoic helpmates. But sometimes you just can’t hold it in."

Horton said she’s been writing since age 11, but abandoned the craft while she embarked upon a career of nursing, married and raised two daughters and a son.

Now, with her children grown and the marriage ended, she has picked up her pen and returned to her first love — writing.

"Finally I am able to tell it as I see it
Forever now I can sing my own song …
I’m happy for my missing piece that suddenly awakened
Look as I stretch and spread my wings."

The book is available at most major online bookstores and from her Web site at Drea Horton.

Reviews at her site and I'm sure she'd be willing to add yours.

Publisher AuthorHouse is at Author House.