WEBVTT

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I would love to, but
we're so short for time.

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Oh, what the hell?

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[LAUGHTER]

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I don't-- as Helen, my
classmate, could say,

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I don't do well
with assignments.

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I was not a good
student in school.

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In the eighth grade, I
was in the dumb class.

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And it was for doing
things just like this.

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So the assignment,
we, all the poets

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from all the
different countries,

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had to write a poem about peace.

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And my poem is called--

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in fact, they wrote
back to ask was I

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sure that I wanted that title.

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My poem is called, "Stupid
Meditation on Peace."

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"Stupid Meditation on Peace"--

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it has an epigraph from
Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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Gerard Manley
Hopkins said, quote,

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"He does not come to coo."

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"He does not come to coo."

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The dove of Christ--

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"He does not come to coo."

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My poem is, "Insomniac
monkey-mind ponders

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the dove, symbol
not only of peace

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but sexual love, the couple
nestled and brooding.

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After coupling, the human
animal needs the woman

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safe for nine months and more.

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But the man, after his
turbulent minute or two,

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is expendable, usefully
rash, reckless for defense,

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in his void of
redundancy willing

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to death and destruction.

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Monkey-mind envies the male
dove who equally with the female

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secretes pigeon milk for
the young from his throat.

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For peace, send all human
males between 14 and 25

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to school on the moon,
or better yet Mars.

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But women, too, are
capable of unpeace.

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Yes, and we older men,
too, venom throats.

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Here's a great comic"--

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Sid Caesar, by the way.

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"Here's a great comic
who says, on our journey

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we choose one of two
tributaries, the river of peace

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or the river of productivity.

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The current of
art, he says, runs

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not between banks with birdsong
in the fragrant shadows.

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No, an artist must follow the
stinks and rapids of the branch

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that drives millstones
and dynamos.

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Is peace merely a vacuum,
the negative of creation,

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or the absence of war?

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The teaching says peace
is a positive energy.

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Still, something in me
resists that sweet milk.

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My mind resembles my
restless inferior cousin

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who fires his shit in
handfuls from his cage."

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