Poems About Peace

The ocean doesn't care that you're watching. This is what makes it worth watching. It was here before your name. It will be here after your grandchildren forget your face. This is not sad. This is the most comforting thing I've ever learned. I bring my problems to the shore and they shrink. Not because the ocean offers solutions— it doesn't, it offers scale. It says: you are this small. And this small is allowed. The waves don't repeat. I know the science says they do, but stand here long enough and you'll see— each one arrives with its own argument, its own shape, its own way of saying the same thing differently. Like people. Like days. Like the way you can love the same person for twenty years and still be surprised by the particular way they laugh at something you said that you didn't think was funny. I come here when the world is too loud. When the answers are all wrong sizes. When I've forgotten that most things are not emergencies. The ocean reminds me: breathe in, breathe out, come forward, pull back, let go, begin again. It has been doing this for four billion years without once asking why.

I used to think peace was silence— the absence of noise, the absence of news, the absence of everything that makes your jaw clench at dinner. But silence can be the loudest room. Ask anyone who's sat across from someone who won't speak. Peace is not the absence of conflict. It's the presence of something stronger: the decision to set the weapon down. Not because you can't fight. Because you've decided there are better things to build with your hands. I've seen peace in strange places: a garden planted over what used to be a battlefield. A handshake between two people who have every reason to refuse. A mother singing her child to sleep in a city that hasn't been quiet in years. Peace is the grandmother who bakes bread during the bombing. Not because she doesn't hear it. Because the bread is her answer. It's the teacher who opens the school when the world says stay home. The doctor who stitches the wound without asking which side it came from. Peace is a verb. It's getting up every morning in a world that gives you every reason to rage and choosing— stubbornly, irrationally, with your whole tired heart— to make something gentle. It doesn't look like a dove. It looks like a woman planting tomatoes in a war zone. It looks like choosing the longer conversation instead of the louder one. It looks like being strong enough to be soft. Which, it turns out, is the hardest thing a person can do.

It's raining again and I have nowhere to be angry about it. No picnic canceled. No commute ruined. Just rain doing the only thing rain knows how to do: falling. There's a lesson there if you want it. I don't. I just want to stand at the window and watch the world get honestly wet. Rain doesn't pretend. It doesn't negotiate. It doesn't check the forecast of your plans and adjust itself accordingly. It arrives. It commits. It soaks everything equally— the garden you planted with hope and the car you forgot to close the window on. I love the sound of it on a roof— that drumming that says you're inside and everything else isn't. I love the smell of it— petrichor, the earth's way of saying I missed this. I love the way people run from it as if they're not sixty percent water already. As if getting wet is the worst thing that could happen on a Wednesday. My grandmother used to say rain is God doing laundry. I don't know about that, but I know the world looks cleaner after. The leaves look like they've been polished. The sidewalks shine like someone cared enough to mop. And the quiet— that particular quiet of a city after the storm passes— is the closest thing to peace I've found that doesn't require meditation or money or effort. Just rain. Just standing still. Just letting something wash over you without trying to stop it. Which, now that I think about it, might be the lesson after all.