Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: peace poetry

  • Foundation Announces 2014 Peace Poetry Award Winners

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    CONTACT: Carol Warner, Poetry Award Coordinator
    (805) 965-3443
    cwarner@napf.org

    Santa Barbara, CA (October 15, 2014) – The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of its Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards. Since 1995, the Foundation has encouraged poets to explore and illuminate positive visions of peace and the human spirit through these Awards. The poetry awards are offered in three categories: Adult; Youth (13 to 18); and Children (12 and under).

    In the Adult category, Devreaux Baker, from Mendocino, California, was awarded the $1,000 First Place Prize for her poem “In the Year of the Drone.” Ms. Baker has published three books of poetry, with a fourth to be published in January 2015. She has taught poetry workshops in France, Mexico and the United States; and Poetry in the Schools through the California Poets In Schools Program. Her awards include the 2011 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Hawaii Council on Humanities International Poetry Prize, and the Women’s Global Leadership Poetry Award.

    The First Place Prize of $200 in the Youth (13 to 18) category was awarded to Sophia Marusic for her poem “Vietnam: January 28, 1973.” Ms. Marusic lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and is a sophomore at John Burroughs School. She is the art editor of her school literary magazine and is a member of the St. Louis Poetry Center.

    An Honorable Mention in the Youth (13 to 18) category was awarded to Alice Yanhong Lu for her poem “Free.” Ms. Lu lives in North Potomac, Maryland, and attends the University of Maryland, College Park.

    In the Children (12 and under) category, the First Place Prize of $200 was awarded to Leila Metres for her poem “Soil Soul.” Leila lives in University Heights Ohio, where she is home schooled.

    The Peace Poetry Awards are named for the late Barbara Mandigo Kelly, a poet, pianist and peace advocate.

    Two anthologies of winning poems in the annual Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards have been published. The first anthology, The Poetry of Peace, was published by Capra Press in 2003. The second anthology, Never Enough Flowers: The Poetry of Peace II, was published by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in 2012. The winning poems since 1995 are also available to read at http://www.peacecontests.org/poetry/winners.pdf.

    For more information, including the 2015 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards Guidelines, please visit the Foundation’s website at http://www.peacecontests.org/poetry/index.php or contact the Foundation at (805) 965-3443.

    # # #

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan international organization with consultative status to the United Nations. For 32 years, the Foundation’s mission has been to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons, and to empower peace leaders.

  • The Turn of a Key

    David KriegerThe missile launch officers failed to grasp
    the ratio of death and destruction to the simple act
    of following orders and turning a key.
    And they were caught cheating.
    All they were after was a good grade, to help
    them climb the slippery walls of promotion,
    so that one day they could be the ones to give the orders.

    It isn’t as if they were the only ones who ever cheated.
    It was something of a tradition among the launch officers,
    something akin to “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” or turn the other way.
    Cheating may have been wrong, but it wasn’t a moral outrage.
    While suspended for cheating, they would not be able to launch
    their nuclear-armed missiles, capable of ending civilization,
    as they were ready to do any moment, day or night,
    when they were on duty and received an order to launch.

    What is a moral outrage is that we train and expect these young officers
    to send their nuclear-armed missiles flying when commanded to do so,
    to initiate oblivion with the turn of a key.

    David Krieger
    March 2014

  • Wake Up!

    David KriegerThe alarm is sounding.
    Can you hear it?

    Can you hear the bells
    of Nagasaki
    ringing out for peace?

    Can you feel the heartbeat
    of Hiroshima
    pulsing out for life?

    The survivors of Hiroshima
    and Nagasaki
    are growing older.

    Their message is clear:
    Never again!

    Wake up!
    Now, before the feathered arrow
    is placed into the bow.

    Now, before the string
    of the bow is pulled taut,
    the arrow poised for flight.

    Now, before the arrow is let loose,
    before it flies across oceans
    and continents.

    Now, before we are engulfed in flames,
    while there is still time, while we still can,
    Wake up!

  • The Hawks Are Out Today

    The hawks are out today searching
    from the clear rain-washed air for prey.
    So, too, the drones are out searching
    for enemies of the state.


    For the hawks movement of the prey
    is enough to send them into a dive.
    For the drones, a distant operator
    is needed to make the kill.


    For the hawks the kill is an instinct
    for survival.  For the drones there is
    no instinct, only manipulation.
    Someone must decide who is to die today.


    The hawks are creatures that kill to eat. 
    The drones are tools that kill to kill,
    that in the arrogance of their masters
    bring death to many an innocent child.

  • Of Hawks and Drones

    A red-tailed hawk soars and circles
    above the tall trees and silent fields
    looking down for movement, for prey.
    Gray clouds press against nearby mountains.
    From another direction the sun lights up
    the fields and mountainside.

    Somewhere in an innocuous, but not innocent,
    place in the United States of America,
    a young military technician stares intently
    at a computer screen.  He operates
    the remote control of a predator drone flying
    softly above houses in a far away country,
    namely Pakistan, but it could be any country
    on the planet.  

    The predator drone is armed with precision missiles
    that the young technician from the land of the free
    releases near the target he has been given.  People die.
    They are not always the right people.  Sometimes
    they are children.  Sometimes the information
    is wrong, the coordinates are mistaken. 

    The red-tailed hawk glides on currents of thin air,
    then dives toward earth, talons at the ready.

  • Zaid’s Misfortune

    Zaid had the misfortune
    of being born in Iraq, a country
    rich with oil.

    Iraq had the misfortune
    of being invaded by a country
    greedy for oil.

    The country greedy for oil
    had the misfortune of being led
    by a man too eager for war.

    Zaid’s misfortune multiplied
    when his parents were shot down
    in front of their medical clinic.

    Being eleven and haunted
    by the deaths of one’s parents
    is a great misfortune.

    In Zaid’s misfortune
    a distant silence engulfs
    the sounds of war.

  • Perfect Poems of Peace

    “The world is ruled by madmen.” – David Krieger

    When writers win prizes, something valuable beyond distinction flairs into being: Folks actually reach for their honored books and read them. One recent contest winner published by Santa Barbara’s Capra Press should interest anyone hoping for the survival of the human race. The poetry collection Today Is Not a Good Day for War gained David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the 2005 Peace Writing Award from the Omni Center for Peace, Justice, & Ecology. Recently, at the City University of New York’s Lifting the Shadow: Toward a Nuclear-Weapons-Free World disarmament conference, Krieger read from this latest volume and shared the stage with such noted poets as Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Hacker, C.K. Williams, and Quincy Troupe.

    A remarkable achievement occurs when political protest poetry – poetry that deals with the raw events of contemporary history – also survives as art. Krieger’s satiric, passionate, and hopeful collection broods over the many disasters of violence we’ve experienced, from Hiroshima to Iraq. Often, poetry that speaks to immediate horrors and woes – certainly worthy subject matter – tips over into the sort of harangue and bare assertion best suited to an editorial page. It takes supreme ingenuity to bring such work alive to the heart and mind.

    “Patriotic words always mean that someone soon / will die,” one poem insists, and another mourns the 500th death of an American soldier in Iraq: “Let us lay the heavy bag at your feet / like a terrible wreath.” Krieger’s urgency to think peace constantly shifts tactics, from the evocation of a politician’s face – “a face with furtive eyes . . . that falls hard and fast / like the blade of a guillotine” – to the aftermath of 9/11 when “White flowers grow from bloodstained streets,” to God responding to the slow descent of the Hiroshima bomb “with tears that fell far slower / than the speed of bombs. / They still have not reached Earth.”

    Some of these pieces do fall away from poetic force into straight-out teaching and testimony, as in the longer, essayistic “On Becoming Human,” where undeniable ideas droop from being offered flat-out: “To be human is not always to succeed, but it is always to learn. / It is to move forward despite the obstacles.” But what’s remarkable about Krieger’s book is how seldom it falls out of freshness while attacking stupid pain and bloodshed from ever new angles. The pieces to whom the book is dedicated – the Hibakusha, those survivors of the Japanese nuclear devastations – are particularly moving:

    For every hibakusha many must obey.

    For every hibakusha many must be silent.

    The volume also ranges out to related topics, from giving advice to graduating seniors and celebrating the poet Robert Bly “who gave us the gift of freshness,” to expressing a longing for a simpler time when men “could read the stars” and “knew how to greet bears.” A shatteringly stark alphabetical listing of 52 “Unhealed Wounds of Humanity” – “Kent State, Kosovo, Kuwait, / Manhattan, Midway, My Lai” – shares these pages with a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr., a visionary visit of Einstein to the poet’s garden, and “Fifty-One Reasons for Hope,” a listing that includes “Pablo Neruda,” “Teachers,” “The Ascendancy of Women,” and “Our Capacity to Love.”

    From WWII to Abu Ghraib, here we have a voice that will not let us forget or turn away. What Terry Tempest Williams wrote of an earlier volume of poems edited by Krieger, The Poetry of Peace, holds equally well for this collection: “May we read each of these poems as a prayer.”

    Originally published by the Santa Barbara Independent.

  • Searching for the Words

    “Poetry is an act of peace.” — Pablo Neruda

    I want to write a poem that feeds the hungry, a poem that makes the world healthy, one that ends torture and replaces greed with compassion.

    I want to write a poem that awakens people to the horror of war, a poem that ends our addiction to violence, one that reveals the obscenity of sending young men and women to war.

    I want to write a poem that defeats nationalism and militarism and every other “ism,” a poem that celebrates human dignity and the beauty and abundance of the earth.

    I want to write a poem that brings down leaders before they commit genocide and other intolerable crimes, a poem that ends impunity.

    I want to write a poem that celebrates the miracle of life, one that makes young people aware of their own beauty and fills them with courage to fight for justice.

    I am searching for the words, the grammar, the language, the rhythms to write such a poem.

    Such words are still forming like cooling lava, and the rules of grammar are as uncertain as mist. But the language, the language must be of the heart’s pulse. And the rhythms must be those of the wind and tides.

    A poem of such magic cannot be found in books or on ancient scrolls. Such a poem cannot be written in stone, or ink or even blood. It can only be lived.

  • Road Markers

    Road Markers

    We keep passing road markers
    on the long, curved trail of death in Iraq.

    There were one hundred thirty-eight dead American soldiers
    when Bush, impersonating a combat pilot,
    proclaimed, Mission Accomplished.

    Then it was two hundred, then three, four, five hundred.
    Now we have passed the nine hundred marker
    on the bitter trail of death.

    Are we safer? Do they hate us less?
    Perhaps this doesn’t happen until we pass a thousand,
    or perhaps two or three or ten thousand.

    Or perhaps not until as many Americans have died
    as Iraqis we have killed.
    Perhaps they will never hate us less.

    Nor will we ever be safer
    while we are dropping bombs on Iraqis, or Iranians,
    or North Koreans. Anyone.

    What was it we accomplished so early on the trail of death?
    And didn’t Bush look dashing all dressed up for war?

    Baghdad, 21 July 2004 (Associated Press): “A roadside bomb exploded north of Baghdad early Wednesday, killing one U.S. 1st Infantry Division soldier and bringing to 900 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of military operations in March 2003.”

  • Advice To Graduates

    Always remember this:
    You are a miracle
    Made up of dancing atoms
    That can talk and sing,
    Listen and remember, and laugh,
    At times even at yourself.
    You are a miracle
    Whose atoms existed before time.
    Born of the Big Bang, you are connected
    To everything – to mountains and oceans,
    To the winds and wilderness, to the creatures
    Of the sea and air and land.
    You are a member of the human family.
    You are a miracle, entirely unique.
    There has never been another
    With your combination of talents, dreams,
    Desires and hopes. You can create.
    You are capable of love and compassion.
    You are a miracle.
    You are a gift of creation to itself.
    You are here for a purpose which you must find.
    Your presence here is sacred – and you will
    Change the world.

    *Dr. Krieger’s poem, composed in March 2000, was read at the Soka Junior and Senior High School graduation ceremony in Tokyo, during which the foundation’s World Citizenship Award was presented to Daisaku Ikeda, the president of Soka Gakkai International.