Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, COME, PEACE, by ALICE MONKS MEARS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

COME, PEACE, by                    
First Line: If in your hour of clapping bells
Last Line: Be other than dread annunciation?
Subject(s): Death; Peace; Dead, The


If in your hour of clapping bells
you, peace, with an iron blow could shiver
to bits the static plaster of your old identity,
turn Hercules to sweep a river
through our evil stables — then we could cry
hail, oh, hail, without the gong
of our fear echoing the bells.

Now we, moving with the immediate
fury, ache for your skill
of too-feminine hand, for opiate
of your known tranquil
image, for the motionless outline, peace.
While the blood roars destruction
between ear and brain, we breathe: come again,
quiet, quiet when no violence lifts
a grain of loam, when
the pure single sound of bird
can take all heaven,
when the negligible insect can be heard
stitching under starlight.

The dead have their incessant mass:
voices naming them to God wordlessly
toll, toll under the gothic hours.
What lament,
what dirge have they who by your advent
will be lost? Under whose foot suddenly
the bridge to the fantastic province of quiet
will be splintering glass?

They were burned down to one final anger,
sheared on a pattern of imperative act.
Always, like a mirror witchcast
to hold monstrous form long dissolved,
they will be the recording of horror, minute, exact,
of the present to be past.
They have been instrument unique,
not to be recast, fierce ultimates involved.
Let their dirge be without pity; they were shaped
to an almighty anger.
(Pity be for those who make the overtone
of loss on loss, whose hearts follow
death alone, and leave them like the locust skin
on the bark, insensate, hollow.
Pity be for those.)

Come, peace. We cannot evade
the real conjunctive of your hour. When our wonder
lifts with the bells, no elation
can obscure that landscape where the grown tree
of our aim has split enormously;
where the gouged earth wastes, the litter
of peoples and cities turns rotten, bitter;
where crack, to thunder
down into the valleys of all famine,
the dams of hate and need.
Come, peace. How can the word of you
be other than dread annunciation?





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