Dance of Peace

Dance with me among ideas of peace,

Not the kind negotiated by men in pressed suits

who move borders across maps like checkers on a kitchen table,

but the fragile peace of exhausted mothers

sharing bread beside a checkpoint

while their children chase the same stray cat through rubble.

Choreograph a way forward.

Teach our feet another language besides marching.

Let the rhythm be something other than sirens,

other than drones sewing fire into apartment roofs,

other than fathers digging with bare hands

through concrete dust for names they love.

Peace doesn’t have to mean

one side wins and the other side loses.

That is genocide wearing a diplomat’s tie.

That is victory piled in mass graves.

That is history repeating itself

with new flags stitched over old wounds.

Who pissed in the stream first

does not give ownership.

The water keeps flowing anyway,

downhill through villages, refugee camps, cemeteries,

until it empties into the same cesspool

where even empires have to drink.

Was it Ishmael or Isaac

who Abraham offered up?

Old men and clerics still argue scripture

while children bleed through bandages

mothers memorize the shapes of bodies under sheets.

I would willingly sacrifice both stories.

both inheritances of an ancient holy grievance,

if the killing would stop.

Burn every genealogy that demands blood payment.

Melt every sacred knife into a farming tool.

Let heaven survive without proof of ownership.

Bibi and Yahya are both butchers.

It is only that one side is winning.

But the butchery continues

no matter whose hand holds the knife,

no matter whose dead are counted first,

no matter whose television channels narrate the suffering.

Who did what first

does not justify the violence now.

A child crushed beneath concrete

did not launch rockets.

A grandmother trembling in terror

did not plan massacres.

The dead inherit no strategy.

Neither side is willing to accept a world

where grief belongs equally to everyone.

Because shared grief demands shared humanity,

and shared humanity dismantles wars

faster than sanctions or missiles ever could.

So dance with me among ideas of peace.

Even if our steps are clumsy.

Even if the music keeps breaking apart.

Let us move as though survival itself

is holier than land,

holier than vengeance,

holier than history.

5-28-26