Tag: peace

Posted in Uncategorized

Reflections on the First of the Sunday of 5th Feb, 2023 by Noel Ihebuzor

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/020523.cfm

The first reading taken from the book of the prophet Isaiah is powerful and speaks to our world where peace and justice are in acute short supply. If you are in doubt, just look at the way injustice, selfishness and greed have combined to botch the current currency notes change exercise in Nigeria and are now creating serious hardships for millions of people in Nigeria. Can the mind be at peace in such a situation?

Isaiah lays out in very clear terms what we must do for peace and justice to reign. The starting point is a love that gives and gives. When we begin with such love, the road to human centered development opens and the SDGs become realisable. But such love means we must master and dominate our selfishness or it will dominate us. Such love means we must dominate our greed because it is greed that makes us steal from the commonwealth. Such love means caring and sharing. Such love means a commitment to address the drivers of poverty and exclusion. Such love means that we become messangers of fairness and equity.

Filled with such love, we then act in our individual capacities and our different ways using gifts that God has endowed us with to reduce poverty, hunger, illiteracy, poor health, gender discrimination, joblessness, exclusion and injustice. Tall order, you will say, but nothing can stand in the way of an endeavour driven by love, nourished by faith and sustained with hope. Love, as we know, na conquer mixture. Take a generous sip of it today and see how new energies will immediately begin to seep out from every pore of your being, and fill your environment with its surge. With these energies, we can and we will renew the face of the earth.

The gospel reading touches on a theme I had discussed in a blog post some years back – the theme of the salt of the earth! I share the link to this post at the bottom of the current post.

Happy Sunday from Amizi.

Noel – Onye Nkuzi

Salt of the earth and light to the world!

Posted in Poetry

Arms and Voices for Peace

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By Susan L. Daniels and Noel A. Ihebuzor

there are arms we lay down
& others we hold open

there are tongues we must still
and others we loose;
the barbed tongue that howls like a howitzer
we have to leash and rein in
some arms raise to embrace.
others crest fists in tsunami rage, or balance hands
that shape silos tilted skyward, curved metal calculated 
and conducted to maximum strikesthe tongue that coos

softer than the dove,
sweeter as beautiful rays splashed
on the wide bosom of a waking beach
i would plot the curve of a cheek, rested
on my shoulder, lay down
what holds us at arm’s length
and instead open–
a gesture with a bell’s resonance
that tongue whose voice melodiously flutters
under a blue sky,
let her reign,
let her caress and conquer
the hardness of our guns and melt our swords 

these arms, these hands
could  pull needles from softened metal
that was swords
and use these tongues to tell it– 

let us close the gaping wounds
on the face of the earth
caused by the savage rage
of raw us clawing at things we never can ever own

let it begin, this stitching together
of something torn

 

***Susan(italicized) and I (regular type face) decided, on Susan’s prompting,  to blend our efforts for the Dverse prompt today, which involves truce or armistice.  As always, this was so much fun to craft with Susan–a wonderful, inspiring co-creator, poet and friend!

Noel @naitwt on Twitter