Cranes for Peace

Listen! listen! friends gathered here
Can you hear the throb,
The heartbeat, of a thousand
Pairs of wings,
Lifting off in unison,
Necks stretched in flight,
Sadako Sas’ki’s thousand cranes
Blanketing the skies in white?

Sadako, child of Hiroshima
And Nagasaki too,
Knew the promise from the mists of time
Had been told the legend of old:
“If you can fashion a thousand paper cranes,
Your heart’s desire will be fulfilled.”

So, she begins as she lay ill,
Wasting away, a victim
Of that horrific August day.
Painfully, hopefully, lovingly,
Fold upon precise, origami fold,
She creates her winged ones to soar.
Sadako, they say, made 400 or more
Before she too succumbed.

And now it has been left in trust to us,
To painfully, hopefully, lovingly
Finish what she so long ago began.
May our every word and deed
Be a new crease, a new fold,
In yet another
CRANE

        for

          PEACE!

Listen, listen friends gathered here
Can you hear?
The resounding throb,
The heartbeat of a thousand pairs of wings
Lifting off in unison,
Necks stretched in flight,
Sadako Sas'ki’s thousand cranes
Blanketing the skies in white.

Charlotte Koons 8/6/08


I was at the Lexington Avenue Arts
Festival last Sunday,
and they had a peace booth there.  They
were folding cranes for peace.  There are
other activities in the area around peace,
please check the WNC Peace Coalition blog
for details.