"Mothers will make peace, so sons will not die."
--Huda, a Palestinian journalist living in Jordan,
as quoted in “Women's Gathering Gives Peace a Chance,”
Women’s E-News, April 13, 2006
as quoted in “Women's Gathering Gives Peace a Chance,”
Women’s E-News, April 13, 2006
Will it come to this, then? The mothers rising
like Furies unleashed, banishing war
from the souls of men, their fierce wombs
howling with the memory of seedling sons —
how they quickened and grew,
ripening into beautiful babies, brimming with
hope, their futures overflowing with laughter,
love, the kisses of grateful mothers — not bombs,
not bloodshed, not rage.
Will the mothers unite, dressed in saris of apricot
& nectarine, African headdresses of fuchsia, green,
& yellow, American blue jeans and T-shirts, Italian
leather jackets? Will they defy the edicts, the lies,
the clarion calls to violence everywhere — the battlefield,
the bedroom, the boardroom, the brothel?
Mothers with dark faces heed their sons’ cries,
their daughters’ anguish; mothers with blue eyes
or black, mothers with Arab hearts or Israeli, inner-city moms
or moms in mini-vans, farm wives and nuns, scholars
and poets, Asian or Mexican, white-skinned or brown,
young or old. Can they re-tether the war-weary
world to their ruptured umbilical cords? Mend every tattered soul?
Can peace prevail if fathers fail
to join their holy efforts? Or must mothers shoulder
the grief alone, bearing the world’s sorrows,
as they bear the pains of labor,
giving birth to justice that hungers for compassion,
transformation that conjures a different kind of world?
Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet who lives in Denver, CO. Her newest novel, The Singing of Swans, is to be published by Pearlsong Press in October 2006.