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

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Qassem Haddad - Bahrain

Words From a Young Night

1

We are not an island,
except to whoever sees us from the sea.

2

Wine in half the cup,
the other half was not empty;
it was lost in ecstasy

3

To write
is to breathe unused air.

4

They delighted in sleeping
because of the treasures it lay
between their eyes.

5

I write about love
the way a child draws his impressions of
adulthood.

6

An impossible dream
is kinder than a rampant delusion.

7

The curtain on the window
is an orderly more powerful
than his sultan.

8

A vessel between water and fire,
an enticement for flames.

9

He counted his friends to me
on the fingers of his hand.
Then I realized
that his hand had no fingers.

10

To rule = terror to force acceptance.
To dissent = terror to force resistance.
Both seek to grant prosperity to the people
under one power.

11

I am not free to accept.
I am free only to oppose.

12

I see the wind playing with the banner
of this place,
while people go without air.

13

A space crowded with answers.
Everyone is singed with answers.
Answers in every comer,
and in everything
there are questions.

14

He wants to apologize,
not because he was an enemy
but because he revealed himself as one.

15

Pigs are useful too.
They sing about the garbage bins.

16

She is like a state.
She puts on her make-up
and talks to her mirror,
and never listens to people.

17

All this night
is not enough for my dreams.

18

Everyday
we do nothing but confirm the futility
that has been impossible to detect.

19

Usually
I let my memory graze on its own…
To forget the wound and remember the knife.

20

The future
is said to be the opposite of the past,
and we are in an endless present.

21

I have many secrets.
I stud them in my poems
and I toss them in the air of language.
Someone has to expose them.

22

This person I do not know
and who does not know me,
why is he so late in arriving
leaving me
to the loneliness of the sidewalk.

23

The children grind their teeth,
and grind with their hearts.

24

Night,
you are not alone.
There are countless other hermits.

25

I look at them;
they are ready to change their stances
by simply shuffling their shoes.

26

They meet to dialogue
and they exchange points of view
the way they exchange masks.

27

Silence...
is a flagrant accommodation of folly.

28

You will not convince him with words
if he is not convinced by reality.

29

Before you sleep
place a rose on your chest.

30

What is the difference..
between someone blind
and someone who does not want to see.

31

The clicking of my chains fills the place,
I,
who claim freedom.

32

My lip trembles now before a word...
My lip is defeated.

33

Be prepared... the past is coming.

 

Translated by Khaled Mattawa

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