War and Peace
By James A. Langley
O Peace, how bereft you seem, how debased,
In the shock and awe of war, how effaced,
What short shrift is accorded you in plans
Of the mighty to gain riches or lands.
Against laser missiles and armored might,
What chance has peace to rule or win the fight?
In the world’s scales peace has so little weight
It is often shunned in schemes of men’s fate.
When bombs fall, rockets flash, shells detonate,
Both buildings and bodies disintegrate,
Children cower, grown men and women weep
At war’s carnage, appalled, life is so cheap.
Peace! Peace! men may cry when there is no peace.
But true peace is a gain of such release
Of human worth, little of man’s life here
Can compare in all on earth he holds dear.
Is it ordained: win the war, lose the peace?
No! Yet our resources for peace decrease
In inverse proportion to those of strife,
As tho’ only war were of death or life.
If those at the summit were in harm’s way,
With a legion of demons loosed to play
Their havoc in the gruesome clash of arms,
And generals’ glories were joined with harms,
Would preventive war be so quickly chosen,
Other means of restricting evil be frozen,
While armies and navies are moved at will,
Youth and new ages left to pay the bill?
Wars decimate the race, robbing still more
Of lives which nature’s Maker had in store;
War’s wild excitement, vain and callous thrills,
Give way late and soon to myriad ills.
Wars’ desolations—Verdun, Stalingrad,
Hiroshima—horrify, drive men mad.
Swords shall one day be turned into ploughshares,
What seemed weak or null will root out the tares.
One day of true peace surpasses most wars,
Whose proud victories are less man’s than Mars’;
Peace inspires like a Pierian Spring,
Lifting human spirits with heart and wing.
Mass destruction is an abiding threat
Midst the evils by which man is beset;
All the more reason to change killing fields
By waging peace and gaining peaceful yields.
Peace’s origin is in divine blessing;
Man’s quest begins in earnest confessing:
The Prince of Peace shall exercise full sway,
If heaven’s boon arrives on earth to stay.
If a just war there be, with toll so great,
And freedom hanging on its awe-ful fate,
What fools we are to give injustice rein,
When justice might have brought us peace in train.
Justice and righteousness are bound to peace—
They must lead the way if wars are to cease;
Thus comes the summons from the realm of light:
Make straight the high road with the just and right.
Ah, blessed Peace! You shall yet win the field!
From Guernica[1] to Baghdad your appeal
Endures, and a guerdon shall be laid down,
Hailing your achievements the world around.
James A. Langley is Executive Director/Editor Emeritus, District of Columbia Baptist Convention, Washington, D.C.
[1] Guernica is a town in north central Spain destroyed in 1937 by German and Italian aircraft—the first bombing of an urban community.
