Listen…

Trusting my instinct
concentrating
feeling its needs
eavesdropping
whispering
to myself.

Butterflies and Pebbles

Go into this week
with the attitude that
your peace,
your health of mind,
and your heart
mean more than
getting everything else done.

Making Peace

School Assignment

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.”

There is No Way Back

How can five small pills be so powerful?

The fear I felt before I took my first low dose of a chemotherapy drug was real. I felt very nervous, had read up on it, had researched it mercilessly. The internet, as always, helped me to picture all kinds of horror scenarios in my head. The printed list of potential side effects that came with the medication didn’t help much either: Possible death. I chuckled when I read it out loud. My husband didn’t think it was humorous at all.

No War

The field is an area in Germany with a 280 m peace sign. It is aligned in such a way that it is in the approach route of the aircraft to the airport in Bremen. The mark will remain for about 2 months, then corn will grow over it.

You’re standing with a “No war” sign as if indulging
the inevitable: this war can’t be stopped,
like bright arterial blood from an open wound
it flows till it kills,

It’s time

Far in the Champagne in midsummer green
where poppy bloom between grave crosses
the grasses whisper and sway gently
in the wind, that gently sweeps over the graveyard

Mothers Mending

After the tussle—or would you call it
a clash?—we stitch the torn uniforms
you men bring home.

Little needle, glint and glide …

COVID took February away!

February came and went, and I didn’t do much. Quietly, I gave myself permission to be useless. COVID the II. came- lingered and knocked me out for four weeks.

Beautiful Ukraine

When you clean your weapon
When time and again, you clean your weapon
When you rub strong-smelling oils into your weapon
And shield it from the rain with your own body
When you swaddle it like a baby
Even though you’ve never swaddled a baby before —
You’re only nineteen, no baby, no wife —
The weapon becomes your only kin
You and the weapon are one.

War

He is risen, who lay long asleep,
Risen again from caverns deep.
In the twilight, the towers, huge and unknown,
And with one black hand, he crushes the moon.