Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.

Cole  Swensen

(Statement Of Conscience)

Hooray for you! It seems you caused the White House to cancel the Feb. 12 symposium----thereby giving your gesture much more publicity. How good it was to hear on NPR this morning your voice and the words poetry and anti-war firmly linked! A marvelous and ingenious gesture, and I just can't thank you enough. I hear you've got a web-site posting things; I will send along something soon, but in the meantime, wanted simply to express my thanks.

The Razed Cities

There can be no gesture  now
                      that does not
                      incorporate
as in "to corps" the body, moving
                      outward
There can be no gesture
inward
          the city stands on a single finger.

Where is the photograph
that showed a single building still standing
                       in the middle
He took the paintings out of the cabinet
and lined them along the wall.
The first thing I do whenever I move
                       is paint the walls
                       all white.
There's a painting of this
she said pointing to the photograph:
                       "It's perfectly white."
"You mean it's blank?"
                       "No, white."
"You mean destroyed?"
                      "Then who are they?"

Statement: A Call for Silence

As the tremendous outpouring of activity these past few weeks makes evident, it is never too little and it is never too late. And we must consider what we will do if it does come to war. We will need to come up with ever-more inventive modes of resistance---and one I would like to suggest, among the continuing barage of emails and letters, is Silence. If we all take a vow of silence from the moment military action begins and refuse to speak until the killing stops; if thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people refused to speak or make any kind of noise, it would be heard. Maybe not by Bush et al, but by the rest of the world. It will be a way of joining them, and particularly of joining the people of Iraq, who, like us, seem to have no say in this matter.

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