Down at Molly’s Tavern. By Jim Bourey

When I asked the guy if he preferred peace

or war he of course told me peace because

war is stupid and harmful. So, we had another

drink, maybe the sixth, and I told the guy

(his name was Art I think) that we really weren’t

built for peace. We never experience it in our lives,

and since I’m lifting this all from a story or letter

that a dead guy wrote out in California or someplace,

and that guy didn’t go any farther with his thinking,

 I threw in my own.

Peace is shredded by birth, I said. Then there is a small

silence for a few lucky children for three or four short

years until the peace is broken, not in the way those old

sheriffs and marshals understood, but with school

and all the caterwauling attendant to that experience.

It goes on for what seems like a long time. Maybe

then there’s real lack of peace with a few years

in some military outfit, maybe even shooting,

killing people or bombing towns which can be followed

by going home, if you’re a lucky soldier, into some job

to try and keep it all together. But no job

I ever had was peaceful and the condition

of the country sure as hell isn’t peaceful either,

with politics, crime, drugs and anger slipping into every heart.

Art and I have another small one and I continue.

There’s no way to experience peace but (and this is a big

thought here) we need to find something within, some

kind of kernel of peaceful reality, some little seed

that we can nurture and grow into a life changing

thing, into a place we can go to hunker down

to think things over, so that when we come

out we can help some other person in some way

and then eventually we can show that person

a way, a path, a place, so that it spreads around

some, maybe more than a little bit. Find that seed.

                           Find some peace.

That was all the crap I told Art while he was

buying me drinks down at Molly’s Tavern.

Jim Bourey is an old poet who divides his year between the Adirondack Mountains and Dover, Delaware. His chapbook “Silence, Interrupted” was published in 2015 by the Broadkill River Press. His work has appeared in Mojave River Review, Paddock Review, Gargoyle and the Broadkill Review and other journals and anthologies. He was first runner up in the Faulkner-Wisdom Poetry Competition in 2012 and 2016. He has served as an adjudicator for the Poetry Out Loud competition in Delaware. In his North Country months, he is active with the St. Lawrence Area Poets and has taken part in Art/Poetry projects in Saranac Lake.