on pacifism
I guess I have just recently recommitted to, or decided I need to accept, that I am and must be a pacifist… in this year of 2024, there are wars and armed conflicts in various places around the world… some of these wars seem justified on one side or the other and some just seem to be the result of blundering on the part of national governments… but, the more I read the news, the more I think about these conflicts, the more true it seems that if the human race is to flourish, or even survive, we must find a way to eliminate war from this planet…
my first argument against war is always to appeal to logic… even if one has no moral objection to the killing and maiming of other human beings in pursuit of some national goal, war or indeed, even smaller armed conflict, is seldom efficacious in resolving the dispute… so often international affairs seem like building houses of cards based on negotiations and diplomacy while war comes in with a sledge hammer… that simply destroys everything and makes matters worse…
war is built on the foundation of violence and the belief that killing certain people will make nations live together in peace… that does not work… killing people just makes their families and friends angry and outraged… they do not want to live in peace with the killers of their loved ones, they want revenge on them… war begets hate which begets more war which begets more hate, etc. etc. etc… war is not an efficient or effective way to solve international problems…
my second argument against war is that it is morally backwards… might does not make right… and just because one nation has a better army and can kill more efficiently, that does not make that nation more right than any other nation… usually the things fought over are in grey areas anyway, so there is no one side that is fully right and no one side that is fully wrong… so compromise and negotiation are the way to make sure that each side gets some of what it wants…
my third argument against war is that it is always fueled by greed for money… and the people who wind up fighting in the war and harmed by the war are almost never the people who wind up with the money, no matter who wins or loses… and in trying to negotiate a compromise over things like border disputes, the only way these issues can be resolved is if both sides are willing to dial back their greed and settle for less than all the money, land, water rights, natural resources, etc… killing a bunch of people does not in any way help for any nation to put aside greed and attempt a fair and respectful resolution of international problems…
my fourth argument against war is the obvious moral observation that it is immoral for any of us to take the life of anyone else… I believe that each and every human being is born into this life with a right to live and participate in all of the joys and pains that make up our lives… these include a right to food, shelter and safety… the first things usually destroyed in a war are food, shelter and safety… it is immoral to kill our fellow men and women period… under any circumstances, any time… and it is also immoral to allow our fellow men and women to live without food, shelter and safety… war is always always always immoral… war is always evil… English poet Wilfred Owen, who knew a few things about war, called it a “cesspool…” there is nothing glorious about it, ever…
okay, now that I have convinced everybody that war is ineffective, evil and immoral, let us proceed to the question of how do we end it… one would have hoped back in the 1950s when I was a child, that the inventions of nuclear weapons would make war obsolete… when nations have this horrible weapon in hand that would make any large war, the last war, because the effect of the war would be to eradicate human beings from the planet; one would think that we would look at each other and say, “let us lay down our arms and look for peaceful ways to solve international problems…” before we finish ourselves off altogether…
but that did not happen… instead nations kept building more and more nuclear weapons in an arms race that goes on to this day with weapons armed and ready to launch right now that would bring on a nuclear winter that would end human life on this planet and most other life as well… this is lunacy… it is like a person walking night and day with a razor sharp knife pressed against his or her throat… we must get rid of those terrible weapons… and we do that not by using them, which would be suicidal, but by education and arms negotiations… we need to all know and acknowledge the danger we are in and make our governments destroy those weapons… there is no harm that any nation can inflict on me that makes it morally right for me to launch a nuclear weapon…. killing one person is immoral… killing hundreds, thousands and millions of people is hundreds and thousands and millions of times more immoral…
I am not sure how to go about accomplishing this goal but, I truly believe that military actions of every kind will not lead to the goal of nuclear disarmament… military action does not solve international problems, it always makes them worse… increasing the hate and dehumanizing those denoted as “enemy” makes it more and more likely that an accidental international blunder or an intentional act of lunacy will send us over that precipice and start a nuclear annihilation of humanity…
so, I advocate demilitarization of this planet… I believe that it is the only way to prevent a humanity annihilating nuclear war… there are so many challenges facing humanity… this planet is rich and abundant but we should be carefully tending it and setting it up to support our human communities so that all people can have food, shelter and safety… we are threatened by disease, by natural disaster, by things like climate change and ozone depletion and dozens of other threats…
I think that we could work together to solve these problem and to make a long and healthy life easier for each of us to attain, if we could quit fighting with each other and start working together to make the world a better place for the benefit of us all…
the first step, I think, is for us all to embrace pacifism… we must change our attitudes about military in every way… there is nothing good about military actions… all military action is immoral in that it aims to kill people… that is what guns, tanks, bombs, etc. exist to do… to kill people… so we must stop extolling the warrior… we must stop funding the military… and we should be working with every resource we have to spread pacifism to every human being on the planet… it is the logical, moral and decent thing to do… we must accept that every human on this planet is our brother or sister and deserves respect and all human rights and happiness being born here should provide… and we must always remember that might does not make right… it never has and it never will…
From the Mists of the Moon
From the mists of the Moon I was born
Avalon remembered in a silky dawn
Riding side saddle out of the Sea of Tranquility
Soft, soft, pale silver light riding
Shimmering silent and still.
Oh, soul of the pale echoes
The forgotten dreams of waves,
Of motion, of eddies, the whirlpools
Of becoming will.
Carry me golden sea horse
Into the valley and over the hill
Galloping against the head wind, wayward
With wild hair flying,
Send me cascading downward
From bright rainbows mounted
Atop my bright majesty, dump me
Into the sluice of sunbeams
Rising to meet me
Careening homeward to Earth
In my quickening dreams.
From the mists of the moon I come
Riding the waves homeward
Alee of my dreams breaking shoreward
In the shadowy wake of morning.
Homeward, homeward in dreams
Of dawn and sunshine spreading
Like a mantle of gold
Worn only for best-day;
Adorned with ribbons of stars
All dripping of midnight
I stretch out to dry on the beach
Of high noon reality and breath.
From the mists of the moon I come
Giddy and girl-like, tiptoeing home
Long after midnight, dreamily disheveled
Hair tangled with the taste of night
And the songs of a lunar prom
Lingering on rose petal lips -
I enter the house of day
Pregnant with moonlight.
Annie Johnson
Annie Johnson is 84 years old. She is Shawnee Native American. She has published two, six hundred-page novels and six books of poetry. Annie has won several poetry awards from world poetry organizations including; World Union of Poets; she is a member of World Nations Writers Union; has received the World Institute for Peace award; the World Laureate of Literature from World Nations Writers Union and The William Shakespeare Poetry Award. She received a Certificate and Medal in recognition of the highest literature from International Literary Union for the year 2020, from Ayad Al Baldawi, President of the International Literary Union. She has three children, two grandchildren, and two sons-in-law. Annie played a flute in the Butler University Symphony. She still plays her flute.
Examine Mary Oliver’s Sleeping in the Forest, Twelve Moons with critical commentary.
“The special puzzle of Romanticism is the dialectical role that nature had to take in the revival of the mode of romance. Most simply, Romantic nature poetry, despite its long critical history of misrepresentations, was anti nature poetry […] Romantic or internalized romance […] tends to see the context of nature as a trap for the mature imagination.” Harold Bloom’s The Internalization of the Quest Romance
“It is the destiny if consciousness […[ to separate from nature, so that it can not only transcend not only nature but also its own lesser forms.” Georey Hartman’s Romanticism and Anti Self- Consciousness
Bloomian and Hartmanian tradition of Mary Oliver’s romantic nature poetry dichotomizes the antitheses between nature and self, body and soul, consciousness and unconsciousness, subject and object, nature and culture, language and muteness, death and immortality, imaginative speaker and immature child, transcendence and immanence. The speaker of the poem recollects the mystical closeness and amity with the natural world as suggested by the ritualizes camp trip sojournings in the forest floor of the maternal earth engulfs her like “as if she feels in water”. Herein the poet laureate superimposes the visionary selfhood upon “a stone on the riverbed”; because her drowsiness is not a blankness but the labyrinthine “lichens and seeds”.
The poet and the speaker impersonate Wordsworthian philosophical mind and Yeatsian Artice of Eternity through mimetic imitation of rocks, stones and trees of Wordsworth “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”. Witches, spinsters, crones and mother nature begin to speak for themselves, they transvalue their romantic forefathers’ mythic assessments as they defy the doom of muteness placed on all these female others who inhabit masculine poetic landscapes. Mary Oliver’s poetic revolutions embody mystical consciousness and experience of renewal. From the core of the heart’s engravings, Oliver’s everlasting bonding with nature in the face of sober truth memorializes the unity of the natural despite forsaking the association of supernatural eternity; her poems follow the cycles of the seasons to image loss and the possibility of renewal. Linda Gregerson reviews noteworthily, “She is not so much moved by the works of man, and she somehow contrives to love the world more than she loves language, no common feat for an artisan who works in words.”
Gratitude and reverence of the lyrical naturalist’s ardour of romantic nature poetry proclaims testimonial “I am sensual in order to be spiritual” amidst postmodern milieus. There is a fusion of Transcendental, Buddhist and Christian imageries grounded firmly in the earth, which Oliver views as God’s corporeality. Contemporary mystic of American poetry Mary Oliver stalks the edges of the marshes, journeying deep into the forests to open her breast to the known and the unknowable “as if the edge of sweet sanity” where “wild blind wings open” to interrogate nature of the soul, about its relation to the earth, about the damage of dualism it seeks to separate soul from body, body from earth and earth from the ultimate mystery of the immeasurable and unutterable nature of God heralded by Enlightenment.
Mary Oliver’s rapture with the nature such as the creatures of the wood and the sea, birds of the air, plants of the elds, trees of the forests—this is the liturgy of living things that the poet consistently dwells with and upon the elusiveness of the never-ending rosary.
Further Reading Janet McNew’s [St. John University] Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry, Contemporary Literature 1969, Volume. 30, No. 1, pp. 57-77, University of Wisconsin Press Journals Division Todd Davis’s The Earth as God’s Body: Incarnation as Communion in the poetry of Mary Oliver Christianity and Literature, Summer 2009, Volume 58, No. 4. Pp. 605-624
Mary Oliver
Examine William Blake’s A Poison Tree with critical commentary.
“A Poison Tree” is a counter myth which expresses the Biblical narrative of the Fall as a tree burlesquing the “Tree of the Forbidden Fruit”. Forbearance of the Wrath of God is anticipated in the allegorical symbolism of the poisoned tree as poetic vehicle, abstraction of human situation [repressed anger]. “I was angry …;/…my wrath did end.” propositional content and grammatical structure clash with substantiation of adjectival noun from angry towards wrath or indignation manifested as seven deadly cardinal vices that these lyrics implied in the metamorphosis of the whole poem. “I was angry with my foe, /I told it not, my wrath did grow.”——this couplet’s propositional content concerns the intensification of emotion, a subject now reinforced by the shift from angry to wrath. The shift is mediated by the pronoun “it”, which is indeed in this lyric Janus-faced part of speech; wrath can be cultivated following the verbs “watered” and “sunned”: “And I watered it in fears/ Night and morning with my tears;/ And I sunned it with smiles;/And with soft deceitful wiles.”——–
Wrath is watered and sunned with fears, tears and soft deceitful wiles; water’s alkalinity provides nourishing nutriment for the sustenance of the poison tree as the language oscillates between the conceptual and the phenomenal to provide a tangible equilibrium between the tenor and the vehicle. “And it grew both day and night/Till it bore an apple bright” —–herein the intense cultivation of anger culminates in literal incarnation which the poem’s conclusion is the incredible transformation despite the occurrence that cannot be gainsaid: “And my foe beheld it shine/And he knew that it was mine/ And into my garden stole/ When the night had veiled the pole/ In the morning glad I see, /My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”
Blake intends us to take the embodiment of deep malice and disdain to be the literalization of Milton’s Satanic forbearance from the forehead by the conceiving of sin. Objects become extensions or projections of the human agency as exploratorily examined in “A Poison Tree” in which the correspondence between human and the natural is […] pronounced […] “the apple bright of the poem” suggest [ing] […] a process where intense emotion repressed, because of binding social codes, is rendered into a tangible symbol.” The power of mind transcends that of the power of the matter in Blakean perspectives and poetic appreciation anthropomorphizing the inanimate and insensible to be personified symbolism of realistic living forms rather than mere poetic device of similitude.
Since […] “These poets knew that “All deities reside in the human breasts and their poetic tales or mythologies were imaginative account of imaginative reality and thus true” In other words, that the virtue of Christian forbearance is the psychological repression mythopoetically. For Blake the truth behind Genesis is that emanates anciently—and paradigmatically ——-a sneaking serpent of a man sought in the vested venture of vengeance blossoms into a fascinating macabre of incarnational narrative within hermeneutic tradition.
Further Reading Phillip J. Gallagher’s [The University of Texas at El Paso] The Word Made Flesh: Blake’s “A Poison Tree” and the Book of Genesis, Studies in Romanticism, Spring 1977. Volume 28, No. 2, William Blake 1757——-1827, Spring 1977, pp. 237—–249.
Liza is 9 years old. She lives in a big house. She has an enormous room. She has too many toys and she has a lot of friends But Liza is not happy. She has a secret. She does not want to tell anyone about her secret. She feels embarrassed. The problem is that if nobody knows about it, there is no one that can help her.
Liza doesn’t write her homework. When there is an exam-she gets sick .She doesn’t tell anyone, but the truth is she can’t read and write. Liza doesn’t recollect the letters of the alphabet.
One day Liza’s teacher finds out she sees that Liza can’t write on the board.
She calls her after class and asks her to tell the truth. Liza says, It is true. I don’t know how to read and write. The teacher listens to her. She wants to assist Liza. She tells her “That’s OK. You can read and write if we practise and try together”.
So Liza and her teacher meet every day after class. They rehearse together. Liza works hard. Now she knows how to read and write.
Today, one of my favorite people is “I chose Abdurazzak Khanvov.”
Despite his young age, Abdurazzoq has achieved a number of achievements (I’ll try to write it in a simple way). Abdurazzoq Khanov was born in Uzbekistan in 2006. He can be an example to the younger generation. Abdurazzoq scored 7.0 in the International IELTS test at the age of 15 and 8.0 at the age of 16. And now his IELTS score 8 (triple scores of eight)
Teacher of more than a thousand students and founder of online courses, author of valuable and useful books on IELTS.
In addition, Abdurazzok Khanov is engaged in marketing. Almost every month, he holds free seminars, trainings, master classes for his students in Uzbekistan, and shares his knowledge.
It should be mentioned that Abdurazzaq is a book lover, a well-rounded person and a good teacher for his students.
I wish Abdurazzoq Khanov, a native of Uzbekistan, only and only high flights.
“May all your goals and dreams come true Abdurazzak”
Author Bakhora Bakhtiyorova was born on March 21, 2006 in the Republic of Uzbekistan.
Journalist, monologist of international American and Kenyan magazines.
Tiny Eschers After Rain
If one of these unrolled pillbugs looked up,
glassy, beaded dew would refract the light
from the sky and bend their world of vertical green lines
into spheres of shining blue.
Even if the pillbugs were too nearsighted
to see the geese above them
arrowheading their way north,
the potato bugs could hear them.
Honking-honked birds with their straight necks
crissing one season, crossing the next:
for centuries they’ve been stitching the north and south together
so that pillbugs can have a whole world
beyond their tiny patch.
Lilian Dipasupil Kunimasa was born January 14, 1965, in Manila, Philippines. She has worked as a retired Language Instructor, interpreter, caregiver, secretary, product promotion employee, and private therapeutic masseur. Her works have been published as poems and short story anthologies in several language translations for e-magazines, monthly magazines, and books; poems for cause anthologies in a Zimbabwean newspaper; a feature article in a Philippine newspaper; and had her works posted on different poetry web and blog sites. She has been writing poems since childhood but started on Facebook only in 2014. For her, poetry is life and life is poetry.
Lilian Kunimasa considers herself a student/teacher with the duty to learn, inspire, guide, and motivate others to contribute to changing what is seen as normal into a better world than when she steps into it. She has always considered life as an endless journey, searching for new goals, and challenges and how she can in small ways make a difference in every path she takes. She sees humanity as one family where each one must support the other and considers poets as a voice for truth in pursuit of equality and proper stewardship of nature despite the hindrances of distorted information and traditions.
