Grace Hirai, a sensitive freshman at Culver City High School, came to community attention at last Monday evening’s City Council meeting.
Dr. Janet Hoult, ever alert for undetected talent as Culver City’s honorary poetess laureate, introduced Ms. Hirai.
While she was reading her poem, “peace,” the audience had no way of knowing the specialness surrounding her creation.
To unmistakably accent her true convictions, Ms. Hirai, in the tradition of peace-seekers, wrote entirely in lower-case and without punctuation.
“What inspired me to write this poem,” Ms. Hirai says, “was just the way I thought of the topic ‘peace through people.’
“To me, it felt like a call to action in a way. We need to open our eyes and see that there isn’t really peace, not so much here but in other parts of the world.
“We need to do something about it. At least acknowledge it.”
Honing in on her objective, Ms. Hirai said that “what inspired me was feeling there wasn’t really peace everywhere in the world. That needed to be said, and I went from there.”
It was not mere coincidence that Ms. Hirai presented her paean to peace on the same evening that Sonia Karroum, president of the Culver City Sister Cities Committee, spoke.
“I wanted to help promote and segue into Ms. Karroum’s ideas about the Sister Cities Committee,” Ms. Hirai said. “I wanted to show what it meant to be a part of it since my poem was nominated to go on in the Young Artists and Authors Showcase poetry selection.”
Publicly vocalizing her convictions was important, too.
“I was happy to get a chance to say my poem out loud,” Ms. Hirai said. “I wrote it more to be a spoken word poem than one to be read in your head.”
peace
By Grace Hirai
can we really say we know peace
when outside our little bubble of tranquility
innocent people fall prey to terrors because
of their race their skin their belief and
false judgements and hurt pride and
misunderstandings and conflicts and harsh
flared anger
when we throw ourselves at each other quick
to punch phones snapping bones cracking
when the flickers of the TV on our
impressionable faces reflect the kill the gore
the blood the violence
when little girls aren’t made of sugar-and-spice-
and-everything-nice and little boys aren’t
made of snips-and-snails-and-puppy-dog-tails
but empty eyes and leveled cities and
trauma-stricken faces
when the casualties from the voices not
heard and the catcalls that are taken too
deep lay scattered
for we must know that outside our world
victims are all around
and if the goal of us is peace through people
then we must rise above our wars and our
conflicts and fights and the boundaries that
break us apart
for although we are only human
we must not forget human we are all
Ms. Hirai may be contacted at gracehirai@gmail.com
