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The 2025 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards
Poetry, a medium that transcends fact, has the power to engage us in profound experiences. The Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards, an annual celebration of poetic excellence, invites poets from around the world to embark on this enriching journey in the name of spreading peace. We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2025 Poetry Contest. These poets have skillfully woven words to craft verses that immerse and inspire us to reflect upon the beauty of the human spirit.
First Place, Adult Category:
- Chandra Sadro for “The Offering”
Honorable Mention, Adult Category:
- Dawn McGuire for “Peace Camp”
First Place, Ages 13-18 Category:
- Molly (Siyu) Chen for “Peace Was Never Made”
Honorable Mention, Ages 13-18 Category:
- Ariel Zhang for “Gift”
First Place, Ages 12 and Under Category:
- Aurelia Guillen for “The Day I Planted a Star”
Congratulations to all of our winners! We want to extend our gratitude to all the poets who participated in the 2025 Poetry Contest—your creativity and dedication to building peace through words is inspiring. We are also deeply appreciative of our Poetry Contest Selection Committee, led skillfully and with passion and care, by the NAPF Board Member Perie Longo, and consisting of Christine Kravetz, David Starkey, Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Chryss Yost, as well as our staff member Carol Warner, without whom the contest would not be possible. You can read the winning poems below.
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First Place – Adult Category
The Offering
By Chandra Sadro
I carefully read Yoshiro’s story as if his painful recollection
transmuted into a sacred offering
(such a gift must be opened slowly)
He is one of some 650,000 “hibakusha”
the Japanese word for atomic sufferers
so profound a burden it bears its own name
Alone Yoshiro and his twin brother try to cremate
their dead father’s body the day after the bomb fell
using smoldering debris from the streets of Nagasaki
As they attempt to gather what ashes they could
into a pot from their kitchen
their father’s half burnt skull crumbles in their kitchen tongs
Yoshiro was 11 years old
My grandson is 11 years old
still losing his teeth
He recently pulled out a baby molar
with his dirty fingers
“I worked on it for 3 weeks” Smiling
he shows me a colorful drawing
his latest war machine
a tank like vehicle that launches bombs in rapid fire
“It’s called The Repeating Mortar, he announces
It uses a drone see
even has a backup battery…”
He looks up to meet my gaze
with big brown eyes
deep as human suffering
I hesitate unsure of what to say
(such a gift must be opened slowly)
then I hear my voice… “I think it’s wonderful Tristan”
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Honorable Mention – Adult Category
Peace Camp
By Dawn McGuire
All summer we work with our shirts off
tool belts sagging, stretch marks refusing to tan,
nails hit on the head, or not. We sleep in leaky pup tents
under branch-breaking hail, hard sun that leathers the succulents
as strategic arsenals multiply, nose cones pointing towards Moscow,
Moscow’s towards us. Headed, say, to take out the Capitol
for optimal optics. Back at you, Red Square. We march
and shout into bull horns, block roads, make bail.
We try to talk about balance. I learn not nearly enough
except that planks mostly tilt and the marble just rolls off
the edge. We use a level, try to settle its bubble in the middle.
Mesotes, the camp philosopher says—the mean between extremes
which is so hard to achieve. All those lanes of convictions, cloverleafs
of dissent. Somebody claims a binomial authority. We drink
a lot. I still have the photo of Kim, our 6’5 Samoan
in a leopard-print bikini, drunkenly steady
on a buckling ladder, fixing our water tower.
Her shadow is colossal. Some of us huddle under it
for sun-relief, talk Mesotes— which, it turns out, is also
a kind of house snake, like the ones that nest under our sink.
I’m the one who finds them, and the one who acquires the dream:
Kali reaching out with 10,000 arms. When she gives me
her children to mind, she promises she’ll be back.
Maybe she has come back. But I still stagger
under the dream, and her children:
much too big to carry now;
much too big to let go—
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First Place – Age 13-18 Category
Peace Was Never Made
By Molly (Siyu) Chen
You know the story of this city—you pride yourself on it;
with eyes half covered by cataracts, you can tell where the river
once ate away at sixty years ago, where sandbags upon sandbags
disappeared with the old shore. But your body stiffens from
time to time as we pass the old refinery. You used to hide
in the riverside trees past curfew, watching the blazing
sunset change into a pavilion of stars. Some nights, you
could not see stars; the sparks from smoking gun barrels
outshone any galactic light. You learned to retreat when
gunpowder sparks replaced stars, but the loud bangs
never fade. They kept knocking on you, years after the war
ended. You still hear them, like a specter that has never left
the refinery—like the specters of those who were forever
left there, a lingering cry of those for whom peace was never made.
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Honorable Mention – Age 13-18 Category
Gift
By Ariel Zhang
At the dinner table, we split the cards and spread out the chips,
pushing aside misplaced napkins and glossy jars of chili oil,
to create a homemade game of poker. I meet my grandmother’s
eyes across the table, hidden behind a thin film of white,
fallen snow. Every time the light passes through her, a part of
her body goes with it, riding on the beams of light. Travelling
at the cosmic speed limit, that is how she learned to escape.
In her bedroom on sleepless nights, I’ve seen her shed her skin
and wrap the moonlight around her quaking body like a blanket,
the inhabitants in her heart waking up to earth tremors
and sprinting outside holding everything they love. Her body,
untouched even by fingerprints on her back from the man
who stole her when she was eight, who walked her down the aisle,
who parted her lips to form a “yes” that she thought would
save her. He is at the table with us now, rubbing a flush of hearts
between his fingers, playing games with little girl bodies.
I want to tap my grandmother but she cries when people touch her,
so I sing to bring her back. She asks me what song, and the man
is gone, and I say it’s a song I invented for you. We defy
nature’s laws and take turns betting counterclockwise. I lay out
my dreams since the day we lost her sixty two years ago: full
house. With a full body and a full grandmother. My grandmother
stares at her cards but she is somewhere else already, looking
for a clock or a life she misplaced. She is lighter than she was
30 minutes ago. For years she has pretended to forget her dreams
and now she no longer remembers. But I know there was an age
where every girl wanted to be the sky and everything
it can contain. I break open the time in between us with my hands,
one for each of us. I give her the bigger half.
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First Place – Age 12 and Under Category
The Day I Planted a Star
By Aurelia Guillen
One day I found a seed
Shiny like a star
I dug a little hole
Not too deep, not too far
I whispered to the dirt,
“Please make this world kind.”
And covered it with dreams
I had growing in my mind
I gave it hope for water,
And sunlight full of grace,
I promised not to fight
And to love every face
Now every time I walk
Past where that little star grows
It reminds me peace is planted
Where kindness freely flows.
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