I would love to, but we're so short for time.
Oh, what the hell?
[LAUGHTER]
I don't-- as Helen, my classmate, could say,
I don't do well with assignments.
I was not a good student in school.
In the eighth grade, I was in the dumb class.
And it was for doing things just like this.
So the assignment, we, all the poets
from all the different countries,
had to write a poem about peace.
And my poem is called--
in fact, they wrote back to ask was I
sure that I wanted that title.
My poem is called, "Stupid Meditation on Peace."
"Stupid Meditation on Peace"--
it has an epigraph from Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Gerard Manley Hopkins said, quote,
"He does not come to coo."
The dove of Christ--
"He does not come to coo."
My poem is, "Insomniac monkey-mind ponders
the dove, symbol not only of peace
but sexual love, the couple nestled and brooding.
After coupling, the human animal needs the woman
safe for nine months and more.
But the man, after his turbulent minute or two,
is expendable, usefully rash, reckless for defense,
in his void of redundancy willing
to death and destruction.
Monkey-mind envies the male dove who equally with the female
secretes pigeon milk for the young from his throat.
For peace, send all human males between 14 and 25
to school on the moon, or better yet Mars.
But women, too, are capable of unpeace.
Yes, and we older men, too, venom throats.
Here's a great comic"--
Sid Caesar, by the way.
"Here's a great comic who says, on our journey
we choose one of two tributaries, the river of peace
or the river of productivity.
The current of art, he says, runs
not between banks with birdsong in the fragrant shadows.
No, an artist must follow the stinks and rapids of the branch
that drives millstones and dynamos.
Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative of creation,
or the absence of war?
The teaching says peace is a positive energy.
Still, something in me resists that sweet milk.
My mind resembles my restless inferior cousin
who fires his shit in handfuls from his cage."