Peace (Poem by Stanley Moss)
December 3, 2008 by ithinkthereforeib
Here is the poem we discussed in one of the classes today – just in case you wanted to ponder it a bit more.
PEACE
by Stanley Moss
The trade of war is over, there are no more battles,
but simple murder is still in.
The No God, Time, creeps his way,
universe after universe, like a great snapping turtle
opening its mouth wagging its tongue
to look like a worm or leech
so deceived hungry fish, every living thing
swims in to feed. Quarks long for dark holes,
atoms butter up molecules, protons do unto neutrons
what they would have neutrons do unto them.
The trade of war has been over so long,
the meaning of war in the O.E.D. is now “nonsense.”
In the Russian Efron Encyclopedia,
war, voina, means “dog shit”;
in the Littré, guerre is “a verse form, obsolete”;
in Germany, Krieg has become “a whipped-cream pastry”;
Sea of Words, the Chinese dictionary,
has war, zhan zheng, as “making love in public,”
while war in Arabic and Hebrew, with the same
Semitic throat, harb and milchamah, is defined
as “anything our distant grandfathers ate
we no longer find tempting—like the eyes of sheep.”
And lions eat grass.
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lolz…that’s my poem (well i didn’t write it but i found it). You didn’t discuss it in my class though. I actually like that poem.
No, we discussed it (briefly) in the other class. It’s very much on topic with our current focus on language.
I REALLY like that poem.
How come you are commenting on your birthday? Not celebrating?
The poem is a bit strange but i like it. Its different, i think that’s the cool thing about it.
Glad you liked it, Jaime. You can read Mario’s and my interpretations on Mario’s blog.
The main reason I posted it, though, is that this poem transmits some important qualities of language: flexibility and lack of inherent (or fixed) meaning. We’ll talk about that tomorrow (I hope).
cool…. congratulations mario! i really liked this poem as well.. its kind of funny as it comes to show how the meaning of a word can vary so much! It is interesting to take a look at how the many different languages give soooooooo different meanings to the word war. (some of them i found funny haha)
Ummm… did you get the point of the poem though? That those other meanings don’t exist?
Really liked the poem!!! Im sure there is A LOT of ways we could iterpretate it!!…..so simple and harsh yet so deep! will certainlly read Mario´s interpretation and compare it to what i thought!!
Nice debate!! we should discuss it……
This is a really interesting poem, I really liked the combination of words so deep and at the same time so… enlightening :p
I saw interesting the use of different languages to solidify the idea.
Don´t know about anyone else, but this poem is so true (and so sad) these days, as Israel and Palestine are at it once again…