By Bill Powell

Editor’s Note: The author wrote this as a “stream of consciousness” and thus there are no standard paragraphs or line breaks.

Pacifists ponder, search,
Walk from the crowd
Of rationalizers endlessly debating which side
Is right and which is wrong.
Not arguing about the ‘cowardice’ of making plowshares
Rather than swords, bullets, bombs.
Rather than widows, orphans, weeping lovers.
Debating with their own kind, taking sides, wielding sharp words,
The love of besting others.
Righteous words about life’s Chess game.  
Turning pawns into casualties, body counts.
Their deaths protecting kings, queens, rooks, and bishops,
Privileged oligarchs of all persuasions, saved.
God weeps for the cannon fodder, the unseen souls.
The cannon fodder of mad dictators and soulless mad elites.
Humans wring their hands over right versus wrong,
Loving the exquisite art of judgment.
Which pawns should do the dying,
Which oligarchs saved from secular damnation?
Some pacifists are given to solitariness, 
To standing alone, in sacred silence,
Saying No to wielding death to any pawn.
Misunderstood, fodder for righteous debates, saying
No to choosing death over life.
Opening their soul to the divine,
To the heavens, saying no to war,
Saying ‘here I will stand alone’, be alone.
Standing separate from the crowd,
The debaters.
Preferring the sentiment of a crafty soul to a crafty mind.
Weeping, their souls disregarded, unfelt,
The tears of their ‘still small voices’ echoing
Back to God, the same
God who birthed the pawns 
Under the grass.