What the Fire Leaves Behind

A journalist asks, What is violence?
and the answer arrives before thought:
A failure of imagination.

Not knowing what I meant, I stumbled
toward what Swami Ramdas knew:
ignorance is not a crime—
it is a darkness waiting for the match of love.

On a platform in South Africa, 1893,
a young man is thrown from a train.
Fury rises in him like steam,
but he does not ask, How dare they do this to me?
He asks instead, How can we do this
to one another?

In that question, a third way opens—
not flight, not fight,
but the long experiment of waking
those who sleep.

Power is of two kinds, Gandhi said.
One obtained by fear of punishment,
the other by acts of love—
a thousand times more effective,
a thousand times more permanent.

The Sanskrit word ahimsa means nonviolence,
but only by negation—
the way abhaya means courage
by calling it non-fear,
the way some lights are too bright
to name directly.

This force does not suppress reason
but frees it from inertia,
compels it to be free—
the kind of learning
after which you do not go back to sleep.

History records the interruptions,
the quarrels that break the surface,
but beneath, always beneath,
millions of families dissolve their small wars
before breakfast.
Hundreds of nations live in peace
while we count only the burning.

Fires start, yes—
but fires also go out.