Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Penny Harter
Summit, NJ
I am in my early sixties. I've taught high school English for many years, currently in Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child in Summit, NJ (all girls). Most recently before that in Santa Fe Preparatory School. I write to bless the Earth and all creatures who share it. I write for my children and grandchildren and the peace I hope they inherit. Most recent books are Buried in the Sky, Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth, Turtle Blessing, and Stages & Views.
Three Poems
FOR THE MOTHER IN THE STATUE, HIROSHIMA MEMORIAL PARK
She does not drop the child she is carrying, though it is limp in her arms, a dead weight; though skin flaps from its burnt limbs.
Instead, she holds it up to me as I ride by on the air-conditioned bus, my wet eyes meeting her open ones.
In a long ago movie: the battle on the ice, congealing blood, a frozen lake of women in black, wailing as they stoop to count their dead, brushing snow from stiff faces;
and then the soldiers ripping babies from their mother's arms to skewer them on bayonets, toss them into fire.
These days we don't have to touch the babies first.
"For the Mother in the Statue, Hiroshima Memorial Park" was published in Grandmother's Milk by Singular Speech Press, 1995. Copyright (c) 1995, Penny Harter. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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IN TIME OF WAR
In school today, before his test, a seventh grade boy sighted along a pencil and bam bam his lips moved, his trigger finger jerked, as the pencil followed me across the room and back--- bam bam bam beside his nose,
and another joined him, two bam bam yellow pencils with soft lead trained on me while I stared down their barrels into the eyes of two twelve-year-olds.
"In Time of War" was published in Grandmother's Milk by Singular Speech Press, 1995. Copyright (c) 1995 Penny Harter. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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NIGHT WATCH
All night I watch for the movement of snow toward water.
Waking again and again, I check the window looking for a thaw under the streetlight, a white withdrawal at the edge of the lawn.
Across the planet, missiles discover one another, kin embracing kin in the night sky.
How briefly each one lives above or in the dirt that cannot refuse it.
"Night Watch" was published in Turtle Blessing by La Alameda Press in 1996. Copyright (c) 1996 Penny Harter. Reprinted by permission of the author.
