A common space for harmonic peacemakers

poems of peace

Some of the best poems are song lyrics. John Lennon's "Imagine" invokes a utopia without possessions or greed, without the fighting that he believed nations and religions, by their very existence, promoted.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

A more recent poet than most included here, Wendell Berry often writes of country life and nature, and has sometimes been identified as resonant with the 19th-century transcendentalist and romantic traditions.

In "The Peace of Wild Things" he contrasts the human and animal approach to worrying about the future, and how being with those who don't worry is a way of finding peace for those of us who do worry.

The beginning of the poem:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.