The Pen is Mightier than the Sword


 
Volume 5 Number 3 (2011): 303-304 
http://www.infactispax.org/journal/ 
 

303 

 

Volume 5 Number 3 (2011): 303-304 
http://www.infactispax.org/journal/ 

 
 

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword 
 

I have a dream . . .  
    Martin Luther King, Jr. 

 
 

I think, at first, of King . . . 

I see him on the monument, 

up there, gathering in the words 

      with slow, powerful cadences, 

       people nodding, “uh unh” 
 

and I think of the pen in his hand 

       as he must have jotted those words 

       nights before. 
 

and I think of the short, squat implement in his hand 

       and wonder about its standing up  

       to the semi-automatic, or to the 

       submarine missile gliding silently in subarctic 

       waters.  

 

And yet it isn’t King, 

       nor even the small, still voice he 

       listened to . . .  

 



 
Volume 5 Number 3 (2011): 303-304 
http://www.infactispax.org/journal/ 
 

304 

it is the writing, the jotting of a  

       phrase:  “beloved community,” “a force field 

       more powerful than war,” 

 

and the way each phrase enters 

       the brain, the bloodstream, 

       the very expanding and contracting  

       of the lungs . . .  

 

Until it is filtered, distilled, 

       into the myriad choices that 

       make our days, our weeks,  

       our millennia. 

                                           --Andrew Moss, 2010