Words in Bloom

Dear Friends in Mumbai ,

It would be a pleasure that you attend this wonderful Festival of poetry at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) today’s evening , Words in Bloom, held with the support of the honorable Government of Maharashtra. I will be joining the wonderful poet Sarah Khan at her open-mic, at 18h00.

See you there!

Ana Paula Arendt

The Poet’s Duty

Ana Paula Arendt

Some say that to define something is to limit its significance, *

taming what should not be tamed,

the effort to make reality smaller than our small selves.

An attempt said to be a tale told by an idiot. **

The indomitable poet has fallen into the poet’s hole!

Like those angels who have fallen from their duties, ***

calling creation meaningless, purposeless, a broken thing…

for not being able to achieve the purpose

of being greater than reality.

The poet may go mad — by taming herself.

But the world will always be greater than the poet,

challenging her to love it, not to tame it.

And the poet — naïve as she is —

will give her life to conquer it,

to bring it wrapped in gift paper to you.

By loving the world, she will grow beyond its measures****.

It may happen that,

by embracing the whole world,

the poet will fulfill her duty:

when carving good out of evil,

when guarding fondness from decay.

Because some poets did this before her.

It is the poet’s duty to define this:

that to define is to limit.

It is the poet’s duty to denounce foolishness

without fearing to proclaim herself as a fool.

Yes, it is the duty of the poet

to know everything,

to explain the ladders of the spirit,

to find the most precious value in dust,

to found the most formidable temples in verse,

to sing of the same landscape day after day,

to travel the many seas of the mind,

anchored in her trespassed heart.

And still, the poet must

 tell people about the flight of the bird in the sky,

and about the shadow of the poet who is its maker. ****

Find flowers’ sweet fragrances and vivid colors,

tell people about the beauty of their dreams…

The poet’s duty is

to see gardens growing

and to grow gardens.

To make words blossom…

Find the emptiness of deserts

and fill herself with that emptiness—

until the sand of time burns the soles of her feet

and the silence of daffodils becomes a weight in her mouth.

To create light

and to grasp light with her hands.

To sow a harvest of light and hands.

It remains to the poet

to find what cannot be found

and to continue loving without being loved;

shining the sun, having the moon, and beaming the stars;

enduring all past battles as their bravest soldier and finest commander.

It belongs to every poet that very duty of

being born of chaos, feeding from chaos, becoming chaos;

building the stronghold of words that will shape the future forever,

building the strong roads that perishing young souls will take to escape hell;

meeting God daily, sacredly, uninterruptedly — arm to arm, face to face, eye to eye.

* “To define is to limit.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

** “Out, out, brief candle!/ Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.” (Shakespeare, Macbeth)

*** “And I must (also) jump from the river of (the state of) the angel,/ Everything perishes except His Face,/ Once again I will become sacrificed from (the state of) the angel,/ I will become that which cannot come into the imagination,/ Then I will become non-existent; non-existence says to me (in tones) like an organ,/ Truly, to Him is our return.” (Rumi, Masnavi)

**** “Leave the familiar for a while./ Let your senses and bodies stretch out/ Like a welcomed season/ Onto the meadows and shores and hills./ Open up to the Roof./ Make a new water-mark on your excitement/ And love./ Like a blooming night flower,/ Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness/ And giving/ Upon our intimate assembly./Change rooms in your mind for a day./ All the hemispheres in existence/Lie beside an equator/In your heart./ Greet Yourself/ In your thousand other forms/ As you mount the hidden tide and travel/ Back home./ All the hemispheres in heaven/ Are sitting around a fire/ Chatting/ While stitching themselves together/ Into the Great Circle inside of/ You.” (Hafiz, All the Hemispheres, in: ‘The Subject Tonight is Love’ Translated by Daniel Ladinsky.)

***** “If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will find/ that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more,/ are but the shadows cast by that unveiling./ What shadow is ever separated from its maker?/ Do you see?/ The shadow and its maker are one and the same,/ so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries”. (Fariduddin Attar, The Conference of Birds)