PEACE, PEACE they say
PEACE, PEACE they say, poems by Martine van Bijlert, Rainfed Press, 2024 (paper, $15.95).
Every February for the last six or seven years I have taken part in a postcard exchange for peace.
It’s somewhat informal. There’s no cost. A friend of mine runs the sign-up list and gets all our addresses straight. She calls it the Peace Poets Postcard Exchange. Which is exactly what it is. This year there are 5 groups—participants from numerous United States, and several other countries—each of us sending a postcard to 26 or 27 other people in the month of February, each postcard with an original poem about peace.
I think of it as a way to put more peace into the world.
In 2022 a Dutch mixed-media poet, artist, and writer named Martine van Bijlert joined our ranks. She is no ordinary participant, but has worked as an aid worker, researcher, and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan. PEACE, PEACE they say is the extraordinary result of her three years of postcards. It is dedicated “to the peace makers” and in her introduction she writes:
As I sat down to write about peace, I kept turning to war, wondering whether I would stand out—a sender of dark collages and words that refused to sound upbeat. A poet who kept reaching for memories of aftermath and foreboding. (p. 3)
Having spent “a large part of [her] life surrounded by ripples of war” she found herself groping for the stock images. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “I lost the words.” It is a stirring and beautiful introduction, and ends with these words:
So we live. We can’t be overcome by despair and we can’t pretend [war]’s not there. We can’t keep calling peace what isn’t peace, but we also can’t disparage what is, or what could be, however insignificant it might feel. We should speak of it, even if we can’t find the words. Because we need to hear from people who no longer know what to say. (p. 4)
This is the first poem in the book:
and on this first day
I realise I know
how to write
aboutriddled bodies
a whole country
in mourninghow to listen to
longing and people
who still dreamhow to feel anger how to
watch the young their
eyes still shining butI don’t know
where I left this
elusive thingthat was given to me
for safe keeping too—Martine van Bijlert
The poems are sometimes tentative, raising hard questions: “is happiness always built on oblivion / and forgetting 
// always stacked on the bodies of the tired”; “listening // to a lone bird sing… / I woke to rain // wanting to know where I could // learn a song / like that”; “can we talk about peace building // about saying bodies / and meaning institutions // saying agreement / and meaning a document.”
Some of the poems are hopeful, as if the poet can’t help herself (and I couldn’t read the following poem without thinking of Dickinson’s abashed bird in “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers”):
while I was away
summer swept in suddenly
rained down sun and coaxed out budsbursting with impatience
leaves unfolding everywhere
shiny and tinyand abashed
by their own brightness—Martine van Bijlert
The 2023 poems are colored by the unexpected and “too early” death of a friend:
my friend died
and I’m not grieving
the books he’ll
never writebut the hole
burnt in the fabric of time
the rooms that will
never get to greethis stooped
frame—Martine van Bijlert
I apologize for putting—in a review!—three entire poems, but they are so short, and I found the cumulative effect of them so moving. In this last one, the words “but the hole” stand alone in the poem, indented, set off by white space on all sides, a hole in the poem. The poet writes “I’m not grieving,” but we don’t believe her. The poem is made of grief.
I hope some of you will find this book for yourself. Her website is a good starting place: https://www.martinevanbijlert.com.
Or you can order the book by following this link: https://bookshop.org/p/books/peace-peace-they-say/5e8d047f184d048a?ean=9789083457406&next=t&.
As I write this I think of Gaza, Afghanistan, and the other 45 countries where the Geneva Convention reports armed conflict. This week marks the three year anniversary of Putin’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine. And there is our own deeply divided United States. As van Bijlert writes, peace belongs to all of us. So does violence. I wish for you the words you need to express all that you feel in this tumultuous year, and, despite the tumult, I wish you bright moments pocked by peace.
decades. Our paths have crossed at poetry open mics in Kirkland’s Book Tree and at Easy Speak in Wedgewood (Seattle); she is a co-host of her local poetry night in Duvall. To learn more about Last Call of the Dark, see my review (of course), or visit 
