Poet, author, translator, and lifelong peace activist from the U.S., now living in British Columbia.

statement of conscience (for Poets Against the War)

For a poet, whose morality and word are identities, there is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty of the world than the innate intimacy between things a poem manages to express. I think that as poets we have the hidden hope--perhaps hidden even from ourselves--that, against all odds, our poems will somehow reestablish a ground where life, in all its true nature and various forms, can live as it was meant to. Foolish, foolish souls, blessed with the notion--the certainty--that a human being armed with nothing more than a syllable may help to repair the world. And yet, if only for a moment here and there, we have not been proven wrong.  

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Fill the air with poems
so thick--
even bombs
can't fall through