Peace, Unfinished
Not a dove but a treaty,
still wet with ink,
signed by hands that once held nothing but a border,
a line drawn hastily through breath and blood,
through cities turned to dust.
Diplomats gather round a long table
believing paper can outlast a wound.
I have read of peacekeepers who dress the wound
of nations with gauze thin as ink,
blue helmets standing sentinel at the table
where old enemies redraw the border
not with rifles now,
but dust of chalk,
erasing what they built on breath alone.
A ceasefire is only breath
held long enough to let a wound
begin its slow arithmetic with dust,
to let the pen release its ink
into a silence larger than any border,
a hush that settles soft across the table.
But peace is not a signature,
not a table set once and left.
It is the daily breath
of tending what refuses to leave the border
between memory and wound,
each morning choosing to lift the ink again,
though the page keeps turning to dust.
Perhaps we are all made of dust
that argues with itself across a table,
each nation a paragraph of ink
trying to become a single breath.
The charter calls it dignity; I call it a wound
we bandage nightly at the border,
not to erase the border,
not to deny the wound,
but to keep faith that the dust
will someday settle into something whole,
this breath we share,
this fragile, shared table,
this covenant renewed in ink
and human, human breath.
So let the border hold its dust,
the table keep its wound half-healed in ink
still we return,
still we bring our breath.
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