Poetry and Peace • by Gary Geddes 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters During a recent trip to Colombia I was asked to participate in the Medellin International Poetry Festival, whose theme was Poetry and Peace. The FARC guerrillas, after fifty tumultuous years in the bush, had months earlier signed a peace agreement with the government and had surrendered their arms, with the exception of a few guns to defend their twenty-three ‘normalization’ zones against attacks by right-wing militias and the drug cartels. I was also asked to provide some thoughts on the possible relation between poetry and peace. What follows is a somewhat revised version of those thoughts.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Gary Geddes {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]