Below is Orli Vogt Vincent’s winning poem from the Poetry on the Frontline event.  She performed the poem brilliantly with great poise, winning positive feedback from the panellists. Lucas Samuel also performed with real confidence and energy in his rendition of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Does It Matter’. They were both fantastic ambassadors for JCoSS.

Human by Orli Vogt Vincent
It is the greatest noise, that causes the greatest silence.
It is the greatest silence, that causes the greatest pain.
And it is the greatest pain that takes away an identity.
Superficial fantasies and self-absorbed optimisms drift away,
just like the clouds overhead: a sanguine complexity, it seems. Blood red.
Drawn from the lives war has taken so easily. Do they not see?
Life isn’t something tangible, to clasp between your fingers.
It is an opportunity for integrity, something that forever lingers.
Sitting in a trench, forgetting what you once were, with only thoughts for company.
Contemplating how hatred has come to be so extreme: that the first-place prize is life.
Wondering that if God made man, why is man fighting man?
Why is man not fighting hunger, or disease, sorrow, or poverty?
Why are men sitting in their own dirt, battling through what they think is cowardice:
But what is really human.
That glint in the soldier’s eye: that glint that tells you everything and nothing about who they are.
Or who they were. Human.
It is the greatest noise, that causes the greatest silence.
It is the greatest silence, that causes the greatest pain.
And it is the greatest pain that takes away an identity.
That takes away a human.