As war cannot be easily forgotten, it is our urgent, self-assigned task to find different ways of looking, feeling, talking about war and peace so that real links to our emotions, our memory, our humanity as a whole may be reestablished.

Photographer Paul Lowe comments: "I took a picture in Grozny of bloody footprints in the snow, and that for me has a lot more power than a dead body." (Other images by Paul Lowe can be found on the Magnum Photos website.) As we intuitively know, literal images of war do not work. Indirect images that use metaphor, poetry, memory, context, do work.

"You, stranger, soul-mate,
who leaves behind the road of joy,
listen to me.
I know your innocent feet are still wet
with the blood of yours"

These lines, by chance read just after looking at Lowe's image, come from Bloody News from My Friend,a book written by Turkish Armenian poet Siamanto in response to the first massacre of Armenians committed by the Turkish government in 1909. To discover the whole poem, called "Grief," as well as poetry by more than 140 authors from the well-known like Paul Celan, Dylan Thomas, Constantine Cavafy to the (to us) unknown such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Es'kia Mpahlele or Bei Dao, read Carolyn Forché's extraordinary compilation Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. Read it at night, little by little, traveling from poet to poet, country to country, put it back on your night table, pick it up again.