After a day of trailing my mother
from house to house or along the beach
gathering signatures on petitions,
our table conversation would start something like this:
What if America had not fought in World War II?
How else can you stop an aggressor like Hitler but with war?
Isn’t peace without justice just another form of violence?
And someone,
maybe it was one of us kids, saw a way:
what if the German people had not supported, succumbed, colluded?
Or what if the members of the S.S.
had turned toward peace?
It became clearer and clearer,
as did my mother’s voice in these conversations,
that in Vietnam, we Americans were the perpetrators and the collaborators.
We were the ones with the most power to make peace.
Meanwhile the news came in body counts and draft numbers,
riots, conventions; conventions that turned into riots. Pacifists demonstrating
that protests don’t have to be riots. That peace could be deadly fun.
And there was my dad, watching vigorously, studying, shouting.
Other nights I spied from the top of the stairs, long after bedtime,
the Democrats in our living room, choosing delegates to those conventions
or the League of Women Voters planning a debate.
But the best debate team was there around the kitchen table.
There at the head was a man, a good soldier from the Good War,
trying to be the best he knew—
so brave and yet so afraid to think the wars he had fought
might be wrong—
and there was the miracle
of my parents’ marriage:
words could make change, love could make peace.
One day he wrote a letter: the war should be stopped,
Signed, Naval Reserve Captain, our father’s name.
Ten thousand petition signatures, and this one letter:
a man of violence
turned toward peace
before our eyes.
I have received many gifts from my parents,
But no greater gift than this.
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