Poems for Peace and Protest

Split This Rock offers the following poems for your vigils, demonstrations, and actions. Feel free to read one or many during your event, but please always remember to say the poet's name when you read his or her poem. For more information and more poems of provocation and witness: info [at] splitthisrock [dot] org. For more poems, check out the Foreign Policy in Focus article including the poems.









First Poem

The first poem at a reading
Should always shock and awe

It should be a love poem
Of overwhelming force

Maybe the mother
Of all poems

War reduces everything
To silence

Every soldier's grave a place
Too loud for sleep

E. Ethelbert Miller
From D.C. Poets Against the War (Argonne House Press, 2004). Used with permission.