Fellow “Poets on Peace” Poet, Sherry Chandler

I recently made the acquaintance of Sherry Chandler, another poet who has a chapbook in FootHills Publishing’s “Poets on Peace” series, along with my own.  Sherry’s chapbook, My Will and Testament Is on the Desk is available from FootHills and sold in a few bookstores.  (see Sherry’s blog.)

In beautiful, terse language, Sherry paints a bleak and lonely picture of our nation, as, following 9/11, our leaders prepare to go to war.  In her poem “September 22,” “I’d given up the practice of prayer/ god snatched from my lips/ by flags in town square,” she mourns. ”If I had a flag,” she says in “Interstate,” “it would be furled.”  And then, finally, in “Sunday Night Before the War” (after the vigil), “We blew the light out and went inside.”  Sherry captures the haunting sadness of all who oppose war for this, our nation.

On her blog entry today, Sherry quotes William Stafford, who wrote Every War Has Two Losers in October 1966.  (A different war.)  Check it out.