An awards ceremony brought 75 friends, family and students together to celebrate with winners of the 2013 Youth Peace-Poem competition recently.
Powell River Live Poets’ Guild hosted the ceremony at Breakwater Books and Coffee, a fitting location for the launching of this year’s 150-page anthology of poems submitted for the competition. Each poem was written by a young poet on the subject of peace. The first-place grand prize was won by Aoife Owton, grade six, with her poem, “A Chance.”
Some of the poetry submissions were creative pieces of art, which competed to be the front cover of the anthology, called Tell Me a Story of Peace. Sienna Edwards, also a grade six student, won the creative competition with her picture depicting a mother and children at home, clustered around a book. “The warm colours are a vivid reminder for the many messages inside the book, where children often reiterate how much they find their peace with family and friends,” said Eva van Loon, competition organizer.
Youth also find solace and inspiration in nature, camping, pets, music, home cooking and, of course, hockey, she added. Older students consider the prevalence of war and the inevitability of death and offer the reader ways to cope with these realities and find peace within themselves.
This year the project is adding just over 2,000 lines to the International Peace Poem, an initiative started in Hawaii and becoming the world’s longest poem. It has garnered positive feedback in the form of some 240 awards.
Twenty-five classes in six School District 47 schools participated, with Edgehill Elementary School the clear winner among the elementary schools for the level of participation. All grades except grade 10 contributed this year.
The anthology of 184 poems “is a great memento of Powell River,” said van Loon, and proceeds of the book’s sale will go toward funding next year’s edition.
More information about the international peace poem can be found online.
