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
about

riddled bodies
a whole country
in mourning

how to listen to
longing and people
who still dream

how to feel anger how to
watch the young their
eyes still shining but

I don’t know

where I left this
elusive thing

that 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 buds

bursting with impatience

leaves unfolding everywhere
shiny and tiny

and 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 write

         but the hole

burnt in the fabric of time

the rooms that will
never get to greet

his 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.