A Poem by Karla Linn Merrifield

Peace Movements

This will not stop the tanks
in Iraq but bounces on wings
of early butterflies, dragonflies
off Army steel, olive, camel flanks
of decommissioned armored vehicles

come to an artificial halt
at Georgia's Memorial Veterans
State Park.  It does not deflect
the bombs into Andromeda from
surgical trajectories toward insurgent

strongholds near Baghdad, being
as it is of catbrier tendrils, spider
silk as it glides off the fuselage
of a B29 Superfortress parked
behind barbwire just beyond

twin howitzers my husband
was taught to repair during
the first war after the war
to end all wars of his boyhood.
It merely flutters, darts, twines,

spins away from commemorative
military grounds, battlegrounds
half a planet away, into the
longleaf pinewoods to stitch
tranquility into the morning after.

A nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had over 500 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies.  She has eleven books to her credit, the newest of which Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing), a sequel to Godwit:  Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry.  She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com), a member of the board of directors of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society, the Florida State Poetry Society, and TallGrass Writers Guild.  Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com