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

Kilian Kuntz

53 years old

I am a counselor who works in a community mental health clinic and has a private practice. I'm a Sufi who loves Rumi and Hafiz's poetry. And the stone I have in mind in the poem is in the Japanese Gardens here in Portland, the place where I feel most at home here.

Remember

REMEMBER
Iraq, The Twin Towers, myself

Stone dreaming, tracing veins,
Drawing my finger to follow
A way that would be blood
If stone were pulsing, like us.
Silver-winged insect crawling
On the face of the stone
Says change is slow,
Even for watery beings.
Yet waves of still stone
Are married with weather where
Long ago, stone was jagged, broken.

Meanwhile, our bombs make bloody children.

Dark upright density of stone dreaming
Here where we die.
Dreaming a way inside
Where sun struck brown of stone
Still exists, black now, all colors,
Being one being, simple,
Secret, unsayable, promising peace.
A peace that has blood in it,
Drawing my finger to trace its veins.

Kilian Kuntz
c  May 1995

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