http://www.teachforpeace.org/PEACETEACHWEB/WarPeacePoetry/POETRYWARPEACE.htm

Today is Not a Good Day for War

Today is not a good day for war,
Not when the sun is shining,
And leaves are trembling in the breeze.
Today is not a good day for bombs to fall,
Not when clouds hang on the horizon
And drift above the sea.
Today is not a good day for young men to die,
Not when they have so many dreams
And so much still to do.
Today is not a good day to send missiles flying,
Not when the fog rolls in
And the rain is falling hard.
Today is not a good day for launching attacks,
Not when families gather
And hold on to one another.
Today is not a good day for collateral damage,
Not when children are restless
Daydreaming of frogs and creeks.
Today is not a good day for war,
Not when birds are soaring,
Filling the sky with grace.
No matter what they tell us about the other,
Nor how bold their patriotic calls,
Today is not a good day for war.

-David Krieger, March 2003
USA

Art by Katherine

1,Passenger Rage Disorder

This is worse in aeroplanes especially when  they have left the ground.Someone gets upset  and no-one can get out.A few bottles are drunk and then used as weapons
Murder on the Orient Airline

In the worst cases.some passengers stay enraged for ever or  are tried for manslaughter

2.Omnibus psychosis  brought on by  hearing bus  stops or traffic lights speak to you when you are very tired and weary.

3.Brexit-phobia

You  keep passing out whenever you hear the words, Brexit ,foreigners, immigrants referendum,Michael Gove  or Boris.Even  the word cocaine might  bring on panic attacks

4.Hysterical blindness
Stopping an aircraft taking off by mistaking the exit chute door for a toilet door.BTW wait till the aircraft takes off so your wee will evaporate before it reaches the heads of the general public under your flight path

5,May Madness
Calling  for Elections night and day.Refusal to appear on TV when it is a job requirement

6. Paranoia and Fear  of foreigners caused by being cut off from your own Shadow which may be far worse than any European immigrant ever was.

7,Entitlement Psychosis caused by  reading P.P. E  at Oxford and writing essays   after using cocaine instead of tea.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/18/poems-europe-10-national-portraits-ahead-of-european-elections

Extract:

Kosovo

Magazine Kosovo 2.0
Poet Shpëtim Selmani

On the first day blood was created
on the second day death
on the third love was mentioned
and then there were no days left for us

If you take cocaine it can cause the coronary artery to spasm.The blood can’t get through and you get severe chest pain,even a heart attack
It’s not worth it.
Try meditation and stop mixing with or imitating the  corrupt elite and their  hangers on.Stress is better dealt with by  listening to music or listening to the Silence
Be with yourself sometimes
You don’t need  artificial highs.

Rebecca Solnit: Our Words Are Our Weapons

Extract:

“Mental illness is, however, more often a matter of degree, not kind, and a great many people who suffer it are gentle and compassionate. And by many measures, including injustice, insatiable greed, and ecological destruction, madness, like meanness, is central to our society, not simply at its edges.

In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T.M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters. Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, “When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it’s immersed in—the surrounding culture’s illness.””

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/04/fairies-fairy-doors-wayford-woods-somerset

Beginning

If you go down to the woods today – at least in Somerset’s Wayford Woods – you are sure of a big surprise. It is not teddy bears this time, but uncontrolled immigration and house construction without planning permission – by fairies. More soberly, the trustees of Wayford Woods, near Crewkerne, are perplexed about what to do about the 200 or so tiny doors that have been screwed on to trees, and which purport to be entrances to the homes of the “little folk”. The 29-acre Somerset wood is accessible – legally as well as physically – and children have been leaving gifts and messages for the fairies for some years now, part of a wider trend for fairy doors.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterfly-metamorphosis-explainer/

Extract

The caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out. But the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=active&source=hp&ei=xPn7XKr5GsKMa-eXq8AH&q=chrysalis+meaning&oq=chrysalis&gs_l=psy-ab.1.3.0l3j0i131j0l6.1228.6051..8015…0.0..0.304.1069.7j2j0j1……0….1..gws-wiz…..0.rNCFV2THxHc

Origin

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/05/on-poetry-social-change-claudia-rankine-discusses-adrienne-rich-at-new-yorker

Extract:

Midway through a cold and snowy semester in the Berkshires, I read for the first time James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” from 1962, and two collections by Rich, her 1969 “Leaflets” and her 1971–1972 “Diving into the Wreck.” In Baldwin’s text I underlined the following:

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.

Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my introduction to her work. “Leaflets,” “Diving into the Wreck,” and “The Dream of a Common Language,” from 1978, were all examples of this, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems, in 2012. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich—“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder; someone my age was writing down my life. . . . Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”—I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life.

In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

Read more at the New Yorker.