Poetry for Peace (make verse, not war)

The Challenge

I will write a poem a day for the next year or die in the attempt (probably), if only from embarrassment.

It’s a daunting task and I almost backed off from it but in the end I decided to give it my best shot.

The rules are simple: I have to write a poem each day for a year. Any subject, any length, any style. If you want to suggest topics or themes, then feel free to do so.

If I miss a day due to ill health, travel or any one of life’s myriad vagaries, then I have to write two poems the next day and so forth.

I am calling it Poetry for Peace. 

I invite other poets to join me and match me poem-for-poem. It is not a competition to see who is the “best poet”. It is poets and lyricists working together to inject between them as much aesthetics into the culture as they can muster. And having a lot of fun in the process.

Will you join me?

As this thing develops, there will be a Poetry for Peace blog on which each daily poem will be published along with the daily poem of anyone who joins me. Hopefully that will mean a lot of poets and a helluva lot of poetry and lyrics!

If you are a painter or drawer, you can join in too and match each daily poem with a painting, sketch or drawing of your own. Let’s call it Painters for Peace.

These will be added to the blog daily if you send them to me. So in that event, the blog will be called Poets and Painters for Peace (make art, not war) or some such thing.

There will be quite a lot of making it up as I go along, which will be part of the fun, and we’ll see where it takes us.

And if anyone wants to put to music any of the poems they see on this project (whether mine or another poet’s) then please do and we’ll publish that too.

How does that sound?

So, in the spirit of not trying to over-think it and getting directly into action, here is POEM1 for DAY 1 (17th April 2018).

The bombers are defecating
Death over the heads
Of foreign lands again.
United by our music, at least
We poets can waken
The world’s not-quite-dead sleepers
Or – who knows? – reach the hearts
Of our gaolers and keepers,
Bring rhyme and reason,
The rhythmic spark of creation
To the whole unholy
Diseased reign
Of Parliamentary Terror.
Let’s open the living petals of thought
And let their spreading umbrella
Shelter the bemused spirit from
The dread rain of horror
That spews from the blackened souls
Of men lost to the black hole
Of an old evil that predates
Our beleaguered world.
For in the end,
Even tyranny responds,
Not to the dour, coffin-nail
Pound of bombs
But the light touch of song
And the pulse of verse
That underpins our once-magical
Universe.

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