The final activity of Split This Rock Poetry Festival was a silent march from George Washington University's Marvin Center to LaFayette Park across from the White House so that poets could contribute twelve-word-maximum lines of poetry to a collaborative collage poem called a Cento.
The youngest poet who unabashedly delivered his line into the mic from the arms of his mother was five years old. His poet mom said he created his line of poetry himself.
An unrelated poet coming many poets after the child poet delivered this line, "I dream of a child who will ask, 'Mother, what was war?'"
Dennis Brutus stood with the crowd listening intently. Later, in a filmed interview he said he hoped to see poets influencing others with emotional responses to the war.
Here are images from that closing Split This Rock ceremony.
