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SGGS Student & Warwickshire's Young Poet Laureate Composes Poem About World Peace

Year 13 student Annabel Peet has composed a beautiful and thought-provoking poem about World Peace...

1

“An ideal of freedom, peace, and happiness
among and within all nations and/or people.”
“An idea of planetary non-violence by which
nations willingly, or by war prevention, co-operate.”
A system by which each and every human
is able to live without persecution and fear,
maintaining civility by thinking back through humanity:
Out of the past 3 400 years,
humans have had total peace for 268.
In the 20th Century alone,
at least 108 million people were killed in war.
Fighting does not cause peace.

2

World peace means acknowledging
that Human Rights are not privilege.
World Peace means having the right to exercise our rights –
not needing to remind authority of our right to
liberty, expression, family, education, religion, life.
World peace means not needing to ask
for common human decency.

3

Freedom, peace, and happiness
shouldn’t be searched for, but
should instead be given, freely.

4

Birds are symbolic of freedom and peace,
and they sing in cages despite enclosure
because freedom is subjective.
When we are caged, do we call it shelter
and consider ourselves privileged
because we have been provided for?

5

World peace is a white flag
waved from a dense mist
through which no one can see.
World peace isn’t clear,
it’s politics wrapped up in
a neat little bow, labelled
‘reconciliation’ and ‘unity’.
World peace as we know it
is pretending there are no
knives in people’s backs
as we watch our government
put them there.

6

We’re all starting
on the same line,
but some of us are in wheelchairs
while some of us can run.
Equity means we can start Equality,
Equality means we can start Peace,
Peace means acceptance.

7

Searching for the impossible.
World peace is futile in a
world designed around violence;
in a world where attackers prosper
and victims lose everything.

8

World peace is a pipe dream
forced into a foundation of
                reality.
World peace is a pipe-cleaner
bent out of shape from the world’s
                reality.

9

World peace is a warm fire on a cold night;
it’s wrapped up in blankets through a storm;
a hug on a bad day and a smile on the good;
it’s a message saying “I love you”;
it’s undeniably good and
fundamentally pure.
World peace cannot be tainted
and the vision is always there.

10

There is a brighter world in which
our excuse for not having world peace
is not that it is human nature to fight,

but instead we need no excuse because
we have learnt that human nature
is whatever we decide it to be,

and we have chosen peace.

 

Annabel Peet, Year 13