A Call to Arms

By Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Equip yourself for war.
Get out your ploughshares,
your pruning hooks. Open
your doors: add your supplies
to the common horde. Keep
nothing that can be shared.

Equip yourself.
With sandals and staff take
your questions into circles
of power and your vision
of peace into boardrooms:

clinics and classrooms where
words still do their work,
bear comfort, heal, clarify,
illuminate, empower.

Equip yourself with stories
that warn, remind, offer
refuge, with images
to sear the hardened heart,
songs that move
slow feet to dance.

Break the rhythm of the march.
Bend over old volumes
where wisdom lies stored
like last year's seeds.
Gather them and scatter
them on all the fallow fields.