Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance - Carl Sandburg..........Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject - John Keats .........Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge - William Wordsworth ..........Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand - Plato .........No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language - Samuel Taylor Coleridge .........One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves - W. H. Auden ...........Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash - Leonard Cohen .........There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know - William Cowper .........Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood -T. S. Eliot ..........Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason - Novalis...........He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life - George Sand .........A poem is never finished, only abandoned - Paul Valery ........A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland - Kahlil Gibran.............Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance - John Keats..........To be a poet is a condition, not a profession - Robert Frost........A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself - E. M. Forster.........Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo - Don Marquis...........Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things - T. S. Eliot ..........You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in - Dylan Thomas .........Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words - Paul Engle......... There is not a joy the world can give like that it takes away! Lord Byron

Advertise

with us

Make a donation to help the Arabic Nadwah carry out its future literary projects and publications

You may email your poems to editor@arabicnadwah.com or simply click here.

Martin Alexander - UK

A distraction
 Martin Alexander - UK
We were swaying on a precipice
at the summit of a spire
and gazed as spot-lit buildings
sent into the night
blind shafts of silver light.

Those thin, bright fingers
threw the city’s power out
and strained in vain to touch the universe –
but failing, faded high above the towers.

The city’s jealous lights blacked out
the scattered constellations of the night;
gave us instead our city’s humming
galaxy of man-made stars to marvel at –
our inverted, tiny, artificial heaven
spread out far below us on the dirty ground.

Then something sudden: unexpected, white, high up.
A perilous instant – only half believed, neither grasped
nor comprehended before it disappeared
across the angled corner of the tower.

We waited, looking past
the reassurance of the polished glass,
half afraid and willing it
to reappear.

An interminable pause: then
two hundred feet above
a dozen bright white craft appeared
and slid along the building’s highest edge.

They floated steadily across the empty night
like sheets of paper blown in from the north.

Another cluster followed and someone said, 'They're UFOs!'
but all at once I knew that they were something else.
Probing fingers
pointed blindly at the sky
had struck a flight of birds
as they were heading south.

I wondered what they felt as they looked down
on all our blinding night-time suns –
bright sightless eyes from Earth that picked them out
and made them – white and featureless –
aliens to us against the blackness of the sky.

As we looked up, confused, delighted, out of joint
it seemed not aliens but angels had been sent
to show that though our city could blank out the stars,
only angels – impossible angels – could turn our eyes away
and up
to gaze enraptured at that fragile wonder in the dark
and make our splendid city disappear.

 

 

Comments 发表评论 Commentaires تعليقات

click here 按这里 cliquez ici اضغط هنا
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

twitter: sayedgouda_hk / Facebook: arabicnadwah, سيد جودة