Children's Poetry
And Yet Her Smile
Within a smile stirs hope
A world of needs are this way willed
Thus, opaque indeed looms the night
When daybreak bright
Is in dawn stilled
Samantha smiled and again
A weary world knew youth
A child's courage showed the way
To dreams of peace that filled our days - Within her smile danced truth
As sadness fills our common sky
A world in shadow, stunned, asks why
And yet her smile, etched on our hearts
Resides in us, never to depart
Until her dream is realized
-Tommy Toledo (1986)
On the Death of A Maine Schoolgirl
Let us walk through the dark
forest of Samantha's death and hear singing in the tops of Androscoggin pines her epitaph: 'We are meant to live, not to fight and die.'
Her life raced down the cold
Atlantic, like an outbound
schooner running on
the Penobscot tide.
Hope sang in her taut heart like a
halyard in a Grand Banks gale.
'We are meant to live, not to fight
and die.'
Listen, Grand Banks doryman,
to the song in Samantha's heart.
Listen, feller of Androscoggin pine.
Listen, Bath Iron builder of ships.
Listen, papermaker of the north wood.
Listen, potato grower in the valley
of Kennebec.
Did you twine
in Samantha's heart this song
of life? Did you teach her
to frame the issue
square as a clipper sail?
Bold common sense you bred
and the will to act
in a Maine schoolgirl.
To Andropov she wrote:
'We are meant to live,
not to fight and die.'
The words sing
in the tops of Androscoggin pines.
Sing in the soul of a
brokenhearted widow-mother.
Sing across the rooftops of grieving
America. Samantha Smith
is a daughter of us all.
These words sing
in the Pripyat Marsh
where Soviet antifascist
heroes lie.
Down the Volga shore,
across Siberia,
glowing in the midnight sun.
You in Washington
who will not hear,
listen to a down east
schoolgirl's dying words:
We are meant to live,
not to fight and die.
-Timothy L. Wheeler (1986)
The Littlest Ambassador
(A Poem for Samantha Smith. In remembrance.)
You will not find her at the head of a political party, Or roaring phrases in the pit of the Senate Chamber, She is gone, This child of wonder, Who wrote a letter one day, Who was invited to another land, Who preached only the glories peace and friendship She, who examined the Soviet Union Not as a novelist hungry for slander, Not as a politico looking for secrets that don't exist, Not as an enemy but willing friend. Who found for eleven years young other eleven-year-olds with the Same magnificent dream. For the boundary of peace can spread across an ocean's bark, The touch of all peoples in the bright array of night. A year later she wrote a book, About that land which is more neighbor than threat, About how a time like ours needs handshakes not guns. And now she is gone. Thirteen on the road of growth, Where the future glowed, And the past was spoken in glorious shout. The plane went down, And the young girl from Maine; little ambassador of peace Will never know the years ahead. But she knew much, And she did much, Much more than many twice her age In polished rooms and gilded galleries. For Samantha the World mourns, And those of us here and in that land miles away Know that, because of a child's belief, real friendship is not so many roads apart That Samantha's dream must not be allowed to die, That faith must live and truth must gather. Sleep, Samantha, your work just beginning For us to carry on as our living heritage.-Richard Davidson (1986)
Samantha Smith
Such a little girl,
So young,
So early from a useful life
Wrung.
Tiny in years,
So large in mind,
Recognizing fears
Troubling mankind.
Peace, peace, she said,
Let there be Peace
Across earth's vast spaces,
Its lands and seas.
We lost you, Samantha,
But you're with us still,
And by the way you are loved,
You always will.
You'll be remembered
In ways that will increase;
A fledging voice,
A Big voice for Peace.
-S.A. (1986)
