Peace
20 May

What if I made up a poem about a house
on a hill with views of the sea and passionfruit
vines laden, and a woman knitting stories
of family connections and sublime epiphanies
into socks and scarves and comfort blankets
with an abundance of vegetables in garden plots
and fruit on the trees and soup simmering
whatever the season and how she is always content
in her own company but one day she opens
a newspaper and it is full of war and plague
and bullies and hunger and racism and side-lined
histories and abusive relationships, underfunded
hospitals and underfunded schools, and she
looks at the olive-green sea and she smells

the tomato soup simmering the fresh basil aromatic
in the air and she turns on her radio and hears
the voice of a young Palestinian student
begging the world to listen, begging for freedom
for her people and how the relentless bombs
trap everyone in houses and how aid can’t get
through and how nowhere is safe and how
everywhere is under attack, and the woman
on the hill tries to imagine the terrified children,
the lack of news and power and water, and how
the catastrophe goes deep into roots and land and home,
and how they cannot pray safely in mosques, and how when
Palestinians resist they are terrorists and their resistance
is deemed invalid, and the woman on the hill looks

at the patch of blue sky and the free-floating clouds
and puts down her knitting with its happy stitching
its loving connections and storytelling skeins
and tells the olive-green sea that we are all
human, and we all need to eat and feel safe,
to stand on soil we call home, to speak our mother
tongues, tell our grandparent stories,
and to feel the depth and caress of peace

Paula Green
20 May 2021

Every Thursday in 2021 I wrote a poem, and now have a manuscript sitting in my drawer called ‘Thursday Poems’. I was flicking back to see what I had written in July but stalled on this one. It felt like I could have written it today. What has changed globally or locally? How have things improved in Aotearoa as the gap between the rich and the poor widens? Our environmental aims deteriorate? As the situation in Gaza is even worse? As peace in the Ukraine is elusive? I recently signed an open letter, along with other writers and publishers, calling for an immediate ceasefire that Mandy Hager organised. I would like to see an open letter addressed to our Coalition Government demanding to see how they will repair our country rather than damage it so cruelly. Nest year we will be voting.