Peace Is a Woman and a Mother
By Ada Aharoni

How do you know
peace is a woman?
I know, for
I met her yesterday
on my winding way
to the world's fare.

She had such a sorrowful face
just like a golden flower faded
before her prime.
I asked her why
she was so sad?
She told me her baby
was killed in Auschwitz,
her daughter in Hiroshima
and her sons in Vietnam,
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon,
Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and Chechnya.

All the rest of her children, she said,
are on the nuclear
black-list of the dead,
all the rest, unless
the whole world understands -
that peace is a woman.

A thousand candles then lit
in her starry eyes, and I saw -
Peace is indeed a pregnant woman -
Peace is a mother.