Peace Works invited young people to write poems for peace, knowing that often the things we feel most intensely about are also those hardest for us to speak coherently about, unless we can speak them as poetry. Or as images. Poetry gives our thoughts and emotions power, clarity and a graphic quality clearly evident in these pages. Schools from across the country and across the border, in Pakistan, responded to our invitation with a flood of poems by their students. Most of them were written in English, but some were in Bengali too. We asked for drawings as well, and some of the entries are illustrating these pages. We invited three eminent literary personalities to act as judges: Sanjukta Dasgupta, a professor of literature at Calcutta University, herself a well-known and much published poet; Amti Chaudhuri, novelist, musician and poet; and Ruchir Joshi, novelist and filmmaker… our panel of experts selected one hundred poems, and then the judges chose their favourities from among them, which appear in the opening section, called Judges’ Choice. As one reads these poems of despair and anger, of fear and sorrow, of hope and compassion, one cannot but feel that these adults of tomorrow will raise their voices against violence and hatred and bloodshed-and for peace. That in their own small way, they will try to make a difference, a different world.
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