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Today, on Christmas, I've got John Lennon on the brain.

We're at war, we're bailing out everybody in a fancy suit and we're seeing in excruciating detail how one smooth-talking trickster on Wall Street has crippled everybody he caught in his cross-hairs.

So maybe, Lennon got it wrong. We can't live life in peace.

Yet, read two poems from two young poets. They seem to think that peace and good will, the symbolic bookends of Christmas, is not as elusive as some people think.

Imagine that.

Callie Wadler loves her backyard swing. She'll close her eyes, dream she's flying and think of images and lines and verses for her notebook with the flower vase on the cover. That's her poetry notebook.

She writes poems to channel her emotions. She's had it rough. She lost her mom, Sharon, when she was 7. Sharon died of breast cancer, and with a tear rolling down her cheek, Callie still remembers that night when she heard of her mother's death.

It was August 2005. Her mom fell asleep holding her dad's hand, and about midnight, he felt her hand grow cold. Callie was awakened by a knock at her bedroom door, and she heard her dad Stefan tell her, "Your mom went to a better place.''

Today, Callie is 10. She's the youngest of five, a fifth-grader at Peeler Open School for the Performing Arts. She wears around her neck a silver locket that contains the ashes of her mother.

The front of the locket reads "Angel Dust.'' On the back is an acronym created by her dad. It's FEPO, as in Forever Plus A Day.

Three years after her mom's death, Callie continues to write poems as she swings. But last spring, before a dance recital, she wrote a new poem as she sat in a narrow corridor at Peeler.

And there, in that corridor, she remembered her mother and wrote "Unspoken Words.'' It's her take on peace.

"It's a common thought for me,'' Callie told me. "I don't really like people from America dying, even though they're fighting for us. I wish we'd have peace with the rest of the world and not spend so much money and lose so many lives.

"Think of how simple it would be to just shake hands.''

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Cameron McClellan loves The Beatles. She particularly digs John Lennon, the musician behind the white piano who wrote "Imagine,'' a tune about what a peaceful world could be.

Cameron also loves poetry. She writes two or three poems a night in her room and often traipses down the stairs to proclaim to her parents, "Here, read this.''

And she writes it all in her notebook with "The Beatles" stripped across the front.

Yes, Cameron is a creative, inquisitive one. She's 13, an eighth-grader, the youngest of two. She plays the piano, attends the Northern Middle School and wonders about the big things in life: poverty, global warming, politics and her own parents.

Cameron is adopted. She's from Indiana. She was adopted by Bob McClennan and his wife, Ashlyn, and brought to Greensboro when she was about 10 days old.

Today, she often thinks about her birth parents: Were they short? Were they tall? Were they driven to wearing old-school Converse tennis shoes and scribbling them full of their favorite quotes, from heel to toe?

Cameron does that. She's a big fan of "Twilight,'' the book about a good vampire romancing a teenage mortal, and she has scribbled on one of her 10 pairs of Converse this particular phrase from the book: "Sick, masochistic lion.''

These big questions drive her. She recycles, delivers mobile meals, helps run school campaigns and serves breakfast to the homeless every sixth Sunday at the Greensboro Urban Ministry with her church group.

Four months ago, McClennan got recognized for her work. She was named one of Guilford County's seven Young Peacemakers by Win-Win Resolutions, a nonprofit that helps area students fight prejudice and develop skills to resolve conflicts.

And when she did, she stepped in front of a big crowd at Greensboro Embassy Suites - wearing a vintage dress and a pair of nice flip-flops - and read her poem about peace. She titled it "Pretending.''

Her poem says much. But so does what she spied last Sunday in a bulletin at her church, Guilford Park Presbyterian.

She showed it to her mother. And right there, as she sat in a pew up front, she whispered to her mom during the service: "That's it. That's what I always thought. That's what my utopia is."

She was pointing to the Latin American Christmas Creed. It read: "I believe in peace, which is not the absence of war, but the justice among all people and nations and love among all."

May that be true, today and every day.

Imagine that.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com