A Gift Offering for Delegates
Speaker: Pamela S. Meidell, The Atomic Mirror

Thank you, Ambassador Molnar, and delegates for this opportunity to offer you and your colleagues a small gift of encouragement and hope. The recent hostilities in Iraq provoked an astonishing outcry from the peoples of our world. But none more eloquent than the 13,000 poets, who responded to the call of one man.

We bring these 13,000 poems to you today because diplomats, like poets, work in the realm of words. Words matter. Even First Lady Laura Bush knew this. She invited America's most gifted poets to the White House in February of this year for a seminar on "Poetry and the American Voice." Sam Hamill declined her invitation, and instead invited 50 poet friends to send poems or statements of conscience to him, which he would then forward to the White House. Within a week, 500 poets had responded; and within a month, poets from around the world and in many languages had sent more than 13,000 poems.

Mr. Chairman, these poems have been presented to the US Congress in Washington DC, to No. 10 Downing Street in the UK, to the Chancellor's office in Berlin, and other capitols in Turkey, Nepal, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Italy. We bring them here, to give to you, the Chair of this NPT Preparatory Committee meeting because nuclear weapons threaten every aspect of our lives, including our cultures. We bring them to you because you are charged with fulfilling the words of one text, one document. We offer these words of the poets, this small collection of the hopes and furies of some of the best writers on our planet, in the spirit of Ben Okri, the great Nigerian poet and winner of the Booker Prize, who said:

"The real war has always been to keep alive the light of civilization, everywhere. It is to keep culture and art at the forefront of our national and international endeavors. The end of the world begins not with the barbarians at the gate, but with the barbarians at the highest levels of the state. All the states in the world. We need a new kind of sustained and passionate and enlightened action in the world of the arts and the spirit."

We conclude by offering a poem, an image, and the zipdisk containing all 13,000 poems. The poem is by Thomas Centolella, a poet in San Francisco, and it concerns a bridge. Yesterday former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament, Douglas Roche, praised Under-Secreatary-General Jayantha Dhanapala as a bridge-builder, and then called on all of us to become bridge-builders. It appears we may be halfway across the bridge to complete abolition of nuclear weapons. The bridge in this poem is in Japan, and with it we also acknowledge the Mayor of Hiroshima, who is here with us, and all Japanese citizens.

View #45
After Hokusai and Hiroshige

I dreamt half my life was spent
In wonder, and never suspected.

So immersed in the moment
I forgot I was ever there.

Red-tailed hawk turning
resistance into ecstasy.

The patrolmen joking with the drunk
Whose butt seemed glued to the sidewalk.

A coral quince blossom in winter,
Pink as a lover's present.

And tilting my bamboo umbrella
Against the warm slant

Of rain, was I not a happy peasant
Crossing the great bay on a bridge that began

Who knows when, and will end
Who knows when?

The final image comes from ancient Greece, via the Louvre in Paris, and in the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet laureate of San Francisco:

"I am waiting for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder."

Pamela S. Meidell and Janet Bloomfield
The Atomic Mirror
www.earthways.org/atomicmirror
(www.poetsagainstthewar.org for all 13,000 poems)

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