Peace by piece
Look around the world and try to find some peace.
It’s been elusive now, for thousands of years.
For thousands of years,
it’s been just out of reach.
Many millenia ago, we started to war
and tho’ we’d only just learnt to stand tall,
we knew what weapons were for.
The evidence lies in ancient bones,
displayed in dusty museums.
Cut and scarred and long since cast,
there to remind us of our violent past.
Now, switch the vowels to see what we’ve been fighting for,
for a piece of what the other one has,
we keep on going and going to war.
Time it was we stopped it all,
swapped the vowels back around.
Time it was we swapped piece for peace
before we all end up underground.
11th March 2024
This poem was written in 8 minutes for an exercise during an afternoon’s poetry course I had been bought for my retirement from Sheffield Hallam University. In the exercise we had to ‘make a small thing bigger’ to see how it unravels. This was my response to the exercise. I loved the course enough to book myself on a couple more, and which helped me become a better poet. Thanks to Dave and Chloe for setting me on this path!
I submitted it to an appeal for Ukraine and it was published on their website in April 2024. Proving that you can write something worthwhile in very little time – something that I’ve done a few times now on these courses, and which I would not have believed prior to going on them as I always thought I was unable to write to ‘order’ as it were, needing inspiration and motivation from elsewhere. Apparently I can.
PUBLISHED PfUkraine2 by wild fire words.
April 2024