Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Diana Ayton-Shenker
Diana Ayton-Shenker is founder of Global Momenta, an international consulting firm in strategic philanthropy, partnerships & leadership for human rights, sustainable development, art & culture. The editor and author of two books on the U.N., Ms. Ayton-Shenker is a Senior Fellow in Venture Philanthropy & International Relations at Bard College.
Coming Home After Work to Sarah
Coming home after work to Sarah the F train full of strangers’ eyes and the cries of a toddler inconsolable until settled into his place on his mother’s knees his face half-buried in her cardigan her chin firm on his head. I watch them enter that peace the calm and certainty of their repose the all-embracing warmth of mother. I watch and I see in her son my own child, her head nestled under my chin, resting arms over arms, legs over legs as we rock and rock in the rickety rocking chair knowing only this rhythm oblivious to sound or measure the tacit poem of mother-child rapture my daughter asleep in my lap.
Coming home after work to Sarah I slowly release the tensions of a day spent raising money to make sense of genocide by machete, genocide by neighbors village by village, televised worldwide the rape of our daughters, the stench of the slaughter of a country gone temporarily insane, reigned by terror the subtraction of human from inhumane my own intellectual abstraction of this nightmare and the mundane reality of routine, of making money to support those who make the right kind of noise, the right kind of gesture, so that we can rest more easily in the soft, safe shelter of our beds wrapped in the arms of our lovers, our mothers, our delusions, our dreams.
Coming home after work to Sarah the subway screams me awake at my stop with the aching screech of its brakes the doors disappear into the sides of the car I disappear into the rush hour exodus an exhausted, automated stampede of urban, workforce refugees shuffling onto the platform anonymous, amorphous, we are an orderly mob, we follow rules, we repress the days left behind unwinding our clocks, the time worn strapped to wrists, lining foreheads, defining corners of pursed or smiling lips, we prepare ourselves for our private domains funneling single-file through turnstiles and all the while, we remain profoundly alone.
Alone in our hunger, our appetite, our fears, alone with the thoughts that no one will hear alone as a generation of orphans who witnessed the massacre of their parents while the world watched on and on waves of air voiced its concern about the tragedy of celebrity divorce or weight gain. Alone as I adjust my shoulder strap, shifting the weight of unwritten words on paper work brought home on my back, as I climb the steps of my own rented stoop, rising up from the concrete of 96 Dean Street, where I become Mother, milk maid, lover, this home where I live and pretend to be safe with neighbors, friends and strangers whom I know and adore or ignore each day as I make my way home to Sarah.
