There Is Beauty In Words
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Poetry is everything that is human, emotion, passion, love, grief. To me it has the power of making us to change the way we look at and listen to the world. To see beauty where it seemingly doesn’t exist. To feel and experience deeper. When I read a poem, I can suddenly find myself in a world of wonder. Similarly to when I pick up up my camera to explore the extraordinary world we live in.
I have loved poetry for most of my life. It was my professor of French at grammar school, who started the sparkle. He made me understand that I don’t have to understand. That it is more about feeling than reason.
Over the years of reading and collecting poems I have realised that I have a need to reach inside and try to write my own. It has never been easy for me to express what moves me in eloquent words. I might fail miserably over and over again, but at least I can’t say I failed to try. As one of the most notorious dreamers and a would-be opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins said “Some may say that I couldn’t sing, but no one can say that I didn’t sing.” She might have been called “the world’s worst opera singer”, but she certainly didn’t lack passion and love for what she did and believed in.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
— Robert Frost
If you would like to follow my humble attempts to express myself in a verse, please read on. I hope you will find something that perhaps resonates with you. And if you do find a connection, I would be very happy to hear from you.
A Picture Is Worth THOUSAND WORDS
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. But is it really? Can we compare them at all? It seems that I am not the only one who has their doubts. An American writer Jarod Kintz made a very good point:
“Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler versus five hundred words from Mark Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from Wilde. It’s wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of a thousand words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words are worth.”
Poems are images painted with words, and pictures can be equally as powerful at evoking emotions. We cannot separate them from each other. Their value is in each of us. The way we perceive the world around us and how open we are to it.
Universe
1.
In a few trillion years,
when the sun’s fire dwindles
and ash blows across its surface,
when the moon will no longer wane
and the land not rise
when like a cold, burnt-out piece of coal
this earth revolves,
lost and aimless,
trailing a dying sepia glow,
I think then,
if a poem written on a sheet of paper
was to waft along
and perchance land on the sun,
the sun would ignite again!
Gulzar
Universe
2.
If I wish to talk
to the neighbouring galaxies,
how will my voice reach them
cutting through the layers
of the skies?
Even at the speed of light
it'll take a hundred years
to cross the silent spaces.
Gulzar
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.
— Robert Frank