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What can I say of peace?

Peace, as an illusive word?

Or Piece, as a double entendre?

The pieces I have of peace are two fold.

One, what I remember of peace.

And two, what I imagine 

Peace might be.


What Joseph Campbell contends the psychoanalysts believed,

Joseph Campbell because I have not yet opened texts

By Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud,

But he contends there are two stages in the human life

And correlates those two stages with mythology and with literature.


I can't help but find that attractive.


Comedy, as the child 

And tragedy,

As childhood fades beneath the universal umbrella of mortality. 


Peace, as I remember it... was sitting behind my Mother, my feet planted firmly in the stirrups of an ATV.

I remember seeing the wide open plains, the rolling hills and the dust trail billowing behind our tracks.

I remember being huddled into the hood of her amauti, an almost literal kangaroo womb.

I remember hearing wind howl from beneath it's fur,

While my less then adolescent head

Found heat in the folds

Of weathered 

Fabric.


I remember that peace, and I agree with both Campbell, Jung and Freud.


We are the only animals that are reared in maternity

For as long as the mother deems fit.


Although I found peace from my Father as well, albeit far less frequently as I grew older.

That is to say, far less frequently until what my Father taught

Became the only piece, as a child grows gradually

Into the shoes he must fill as a Man.


From there, I had to imagine peace; I had to visualize and construct it 

As an image of shoes, that again, I might one day fit.


How ironic, that his lesson

Would be the least accurate.


From childhood, the only peace we will ever find again

Is in the folds and layers of the grave.


True peace, peace without interruption or foresight.


I don't want to imagine my piece of peace

As a headstone christening 

Some foreign lawn.


It's both morbid and nihilistic.


I don't want to agree with the latter beliefs of psychoanalysts

Because I don't want to imagine peace

As racing from the womb

To the bed beneath

My tombstone.


So what is there left?


I have bent a vivid imagination every which way from Sunday

In an effort to find what that might be.


I can only conclude that true peace, exists only at the end.


And that the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh

And everlasting pieces of peace

Are moments in life 

That are not designed to last.


They might be glimpses or they could be freeze frames -

Refractions or reflections.


But they are not designed to last.


So,


I am forced to trace the spider's web,

The cognizant wheel from birth

That cracks and weaves until it spreads no more.


That thumbprint of ourselves,

With cornerstones and keystones

Unimaginable in their multitude.


The image seared, that we leave behind

In this invisible and yet ever present cosmos.


A forest of fingeprints

And a jungle of spider's webs.


An ocean of snowflakes

Or the dizzying depth of stars

Suspended in the everlasting expanse of time. 


When I think of pieces of peace,

That, is what I am forced to see.


And when I think of infinity,

I am amazed at how similar

The two images are designed to be.





 

Author's Note

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oX2xFo7JA4

Nietzsche had this theory, the eternal return, with roots dating back as far as Greek stoics and the Egyptians.