Jacob Bathanti reads his poem

Written to Read at a Peace Rally
Who am I to cast light upon the human soul?
Sitting down to write peace-verses for mercenary gain,
Hunting for poems and hoping against hope that I need not
Kill them in the hunt, as it seems is so often the case.
Hunched over a school-issue laptop, mining news-clippings for material:
The starving in Zimbabwe and North Korea;
The lame men thronging Varanasi, praying for renewal
Of their shattered or clubbed or twisted limbs;
The shy students who die in Afghanistan or old Sumeria,
Die by misdirected field guns or the bullets of fanatic assassins,
Die in schoolhouses without ever having seen a portable computer ...

(to read the rest of his poem, click here.)

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Sojourners Magazine January 2009
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