Sherry Chandler

In an interview that appeared in Friends Journal in November 1991, William Stafford said this:

In college I had engaged in sit-ins opposing segregation in the University of Kansas Union Building, which, like many other places, refused service to blacks. This was along in the late 1930s. We always felt that our stand then helped lead toward the later protests that caught the world’s attention. In World War II some of us couldn’t help feeling the irony of sending troops across the world to fight injustice when a black person would be denied fair treatment at home. So, I joined the War Resisters League and the Fellowship of Reconciliaton.
— from Every War Has Two Losers (Milkweed Editions, 2003)

Helen Losse, whose chapbook Gathering the Broken Pieces is #5 in FootHills Publishings’ series Poets on Peace, sees that hypocrisy still existing. Her meditation on peace is centered on the lingering pain of slavery, racial discrimination, and the violence that led to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The meditation radiates out to the racism implicit in our current “War on Terror,” in which terror mostly wears a dark skin.

“Faces Tell That Story,” a long poem that falls at the center of Gathering the Broken Pieces, is a listing, a paging through a photograph album, in which the naming of names becomes a refrain — Aunt Lucy, a former slave; William Henry Towns, a former slave; Millie Evans, a former slave…

This naming of names resonates powerfully with me. I feel a need, too, to name those who might be forgotten, as do all of us who weep at the nightly reading of the names of our fallen soldiers.

Losse’s collection ranges from the slave ships departing from Ghana to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, an all-black establishment, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot (and where George W. Bush recently posed for photographs with the Japanese Prime Minister — and I apologize for my compulsion to nail down the irony) and from there to the Middle East where, in the poem “Listen”

A soldier keeping watch in the darkness prays for light
yet sees only the firing of rockets. A native woman —
holding, comforting a child — is stifling her muffled
cries to Allah…

Gathering the Broken Pieces is a reverent book. It is not judgmental and I hope I haven’t made it seem so. Moreover, it contains, in the poem “Voices,” a line that will stay with me for a long time:

And I, reaching upward, raise uplifted palms.
…
Then just as silence slices through morning,
heaven’s jagged edge cuts my finger to the bone.

I See Invisible People points the way to The Periodic Table of Poetry. Just click on an element and find a poem about that element.

And there are still a few unclaimed elements for which you can submit a poem.