“There Are No Words,” “Que Será – Mother’s Stare” and “Peace”

“There Are No Words,” “Que Será – Mother’s Stare” and “Peace”

Russell Willis

“There Are No Words,” “Que Será – Mother’s Stare” and “Peace”

There Are No Words

“There are no words…” with tragedy

Or times absurd or ends unknown

Is tragic in its own accord

For words may be all that we own

For words may be our covenant

The flag that waves above the fray

The whisper that our conscience hears

Our troth to pledge, to vow, to pray

The vow that never this again

Whatever “this” compels our swords

Our rage, our loss, our desperate wars

Against our own best selves, our words

As words come back to haunt and hurt

To tear or bind or cast away

Their power’s clear and undeterred

With words we’re swept into the fray

There are yet words that ring with hope

Those words that wake those better selves

Some words of truth beyond reproach

To save us from our earthly hells

So even as the words are choked

In throats that mourn or gasp in dread

The only time “There are no words....”

Should only be when good lies dead

Que Será – Mother’s Stare

Caught in a vortex of serenity, concern, joy, and exhaustion

Expression unfathomable

Chin resting on an arm

Eyes locked on her precious one

asleep for now,

maybe not for long

a gift

peace to be followed by not-peace

but sleeping in deep peace, for now

As she contemplates

a canvas yet to be filled

a journal with mostly blank pages

the opening bars of a lullaby...

Peace

not to be kept

but loosed on an unexpecting

world, though unexpected

treasured, dreamed

when free, freeing

uncoupling fear from uncertainty

ministering to fear’s wounds

tethered to hope by

hope's quiet voice

soft breath

still presence

unshakable if offered earnestly,

heartbreaking when love rebuked

and stillness only

keeps the peace

About the Author

Russell Willis

Russell E. Willis writes from the borderlands where poetry meets philosophy, where technology presses against the human spirit, and where stories become a way of answering for the world we are making. Trained first as an engineer and later as a social ethicist, he has spent a lifetime tracing how technical systems shape our choices, our communities, and our sense of responsibility. His poems—over 300 of them—have appeared in journals and anthologies that prize clarity, honesty, and a deep attentiveness to ordinary life. His first collection, The Month the Baby Came, gathers these moments with a tenderness shaped by wonder and lineage. As an essayist and thinker, Russell writes about the moral pressures of the Polycene age, where artificial intelligence accelerates change faster than our institutions can understand it. His multi-volume series, Responsibility in the Age of AI, explores what it means to remain responsible, deliberate, and fully human inside systems that promise efficiency but erode agency. Whether writing poems or analyzing the ethics of autonomous technology, Russell moves with the same conviction: that language—carefully chosen, honestly offered—can slow the world enough for us to see one another clearly again.