The plea
by S. Viddaurri

I am just a lump of clay, scooped out of the riverbank and molded to the shape of a natural woman. I am just a lump of clay--A handful of water and a fistful of sand and a warm exhalation from God: Fifty percent God and fifty percent just plain old river mud. That's me. Sometimes I wonder if maybe God isn't all that's keeping the mud from blowing and washing away; God being God... and mud being mud. Sometimes I wonder if maybe God isn't beginning to wonder if it wasn't just a waste of breath on His part; Mud being mud... and God being God.

I am just a lump of clay. A seething bundle of great aspirations and expectations. A juxtaposition of countries and nations. Geniuses, scientists, poets, and painters and their innovations; A shifting kaleidoscope of religions and races, changing, chameleon-like, their color of skin and slant of eye, with each shift. After rain steaming jungle, glaciered mountain, grassy plain, and with gentle irreverence, with innocent and colossal conceit, changing the color of their god. For man must worship a god in his own image, it seems.

I'm just a lump of clay. And I've been fooled and tricked and taken again and again. Through all the long dying, through all the long, howling, and crying of war. I was trampled beneath the hoofs of Napolean's war horses as they passed over the land like locusts. I was there and heard the last cry that was a whimper from a brother... whose brother had killed him for a cause: called slavery... called dignity... called pride... I was there and heard the last whimper. I was a Japanese named Ohura, who sang a scream of hatred, as he plunged toward a deck at sea. Not to land, but to shatter himself, and the enemy: A suicide for a cause he did not understand. And I was a child, naked and wild, that ran through the streets of Old England, France, Germany, Poland... his mind gone, shrieking in awful agony as he clutched at raindrops: "The sky is falling!", "The sky is falling!", "The sky is falling!" The silly, yet terrible words from a half-remembered story book fable, that were somehow true, beneath a sky that, after the great and glorious explosion of war, was falling in shimmering prismed raindrops that slithered down blackened rooftops and streaked the dust on broken window panes. I was a child that screamed 'til at last a torn wall collapsed and broke him like a puppet with the strings cut, dropped in rain and left there to lie among the liquid crystals of a broken sky.

I am just a lump of clay. But I tell you I am tired of all the long dying, of too much sound and fury. I am cornered at last in a time where the sky threatens to fall on me for all of eternity. Cornered... holding in my hands and heart one last desperate simple plea for peace. I am just a lump of clay. I am alone and afraid. Do I have to be? Listen to me! I don't have to be. Not while I can reach out to you and cry, "Neighbor, neighbor! You and I were born together beneath the same sky. Chinaman, Frenchman, African, Russian, Gay, Straight, and Lesbian, American, Christian, Muslim, every race, creed, and nation, we'll hold up the sky and it won't fall, and, perhaps we'll find it was only a raindrop after all. And tomorrow, when we thrust out our hands into the air... it shall still be there.

I am just a lump of clay. Melt me down! Coin me for silver. What am I worth? 98 cents, $1.50, sometimes more. They haven't made up their minds yet for sure. But they know it's not much.

I am just a lump of clay. But put me together in a mass and there is weight there enough to level a forest, drain a sea, make a desert bloom, hold up the sky, change the course of a universe, or of a war. And so, kings, dictators, and rulers of nations, don't you threaten. Don't tell me my world's going to end! Why, I haven't seen enough rainbows, reached enough stars, been to Paris, or driven in one of those new foreign cars. I haven't yet made a snowman, or kissed enough beautiful women under the smoked silver of the moon. I haven't even started to make the dream of life stirring in my soul like a not yet born babe, warm with the fine, blue, steel, tools of reality. So, don't you scream at me about killing and dying when I haven't even begun to live yet. Listen, you, who ignite the fires of war-- I, who piled the massive pyramids like an ant, grain by grain; I, who hurled towers and monuments of stone and steel into the air; I, who took to herself the wing of a metal bird; I, the lump of clay, am a stubborn, strong, and sinew thing, and I won't step out of your way. Not while I have hands to plead, and a voice to cry, for peace.

Peace, that is my plea. I ask it humbly. I am not too proud to beg for peace. After all, I'm just a lump of clay, and I'm concerned... and alone... and afraid. But if you've listened to me, if you'll answer my plea... do I have to be?