Each of you, a bordered country, / Delicate and strangely made proud, / Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit / Have left collars of waste upon / My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside, / If you will study war no more. Come, / Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs / The Creator gave to me when I and the / Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your / Brow and when you yet knew you still / Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on. . . .
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God.
On either side of the river is the tree of life, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. First four stanzas excerpted from “On the Pulse of the morning,” by Maya Angelou; last two, from Revelation 22:1-2.