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    Three Poems on Nonviolence

    By Philip Britts

    August 13, 2021
    2 Comments
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    • Rachel Boyd

      The poems of Philip Britts are timeless. Now, 60+ years after these were written, the insight and message is still pertinent to the current human experience.

    • Sharon Henning

      Those were beautiful poems. I have never heard of Phillip Britts before. Thanks for sharing. I don't see how they are explicitly Christian. It there more information on this man?

    These poems are taken from a collection of Philip Britts’s writings, Water at the Roots: Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer.

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    That my white lamb

    That my white lamb is being carried off
    In steel-like talons to the unknown hills
    And is a lost speck only, in the sky –
    That is not the chief thing;

    Or that I did not have the strength or skill
    To drive off the attacker, to defeat
    Merciless claw and swift unerring beak
    Or shattering wing;

    But my fist is smashed and bloody
    And my arm is a scarlet rag,
    Showing I struck at the eagle …
    And that is the chief thing.

    1941

    Down the years a murmur runneth

    Down the years a murmur runneth,
    Bleeding hearts that wince in pain,
    While the boasting politicians
    Vaunt the claims of man in vain.

    Building cities, stone on stubble,
    Seeking safety in their might,
    Till they grind the men to rubble
    With their bombers of the night.

    Through the earth there runs a challenge
    Clearer than the trumpet call:
    “Oh, forsake your ancient folly,
    Build the Brotherhood of all.

    “Seek the city that God buildeth,
    City of the heart and hand,
    Not beyond the grave of shadow,
    Here on earth, in your own land.”

    1944

    There is a calling

    There is a calling in the ears of men –
    A wind that whistles in the city street,
    Calling them back, to long-forgotten ways,
    Blowing the sands of havoc 'round their feet.

    There is a vision in the eyes of men –
    Of fair wide fields, where gleams the honest plough,
    Guided by hands of brotherhood and peace,
    Far other than the hands that guide it now.

    There is a struggle in the hearts of men –
    A groping of the lonely in the fight,
    Urging them on a road but dimly seen,
    Towards faint music and a distant light.

    O may that music swell, that light increase,
    And hearts be strengthened in the inward strife,
    That men may hear, and see, and struggle on,
    Seek a new world, and find a truer life.

    1946

    trees on the edge of a field

    Read the book: Water at the Roots: Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer

    Contributed By PhilipBritts Philip Britts

    Farmer-poet Philip Britts was born in 1917 in Devon, England. Britts became a pacifist, joined the Bruderhof, and moved to South America during World War II.

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