In his first Christmas address as pontiff, Leo XIV referenced the poem below by the acclaimed Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
As we enter the year 2026, let us pray for justice and peace.
Wildpeace
Not the peace of a cease-fire,
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words,
without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp:
let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds—who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
-Y. Amichai, “Wildpeace”, in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.