i can't believe i procrastinated about the dalai lama

So a month or so back there was this little contest at our school, and it consisted of submitting artwork, essays, and poetry. The people who got picked would get a chance to fly to Maui and meet the Dalai Lama. I was all hyped up, figuring I would focus on the Buddhist philosophy that one must accept that all life is suffering, yet that the goal was to follow a path of inner peace (attained by making others happy, but that's for another post...).

The problem was I forgot to do it and submit it on time.

Oh well, here's my poem:

peace
an everlasting notion
that only exists
in the presence of
b
l
o
o
d
s
h
e
d
for with out up there is no

down
with the symptoms of our suffering
lies our longing for triumphant

tranquility.

balance - with the absence of gun barrels
lie our dreams
hopes
wishes of a slate wiped clean of
the systematic genocide of
cooperation via the ammunition that is ignorance
no longer shall peace be
a goal out of the reach of our greedy hands

irony - with our ignorance towards definition
comes the climactic

calm.

In essence what it's saying is that the notion of peace would not exist without the existence of violence, since if there was no bloodshed peace would simply be the status quo. Noone would know better. This is sort of reflected in the line "with our ignorance towards definition". It's saying that if we don't know what peace means, we've acheived a state where there is no violence, since these terms are relative to each other (just like up is relative to down).

If I had to put a title to it, I would probably name it sil vis pacem, para bellum.

In latin it means "if you want peace, prepare for war".

Of course I'm not being completely serious with this title. It's sort of the irony/paradox of that statement that resonates with me.

Anyway it's not a polished poem, but oh well.