Several poets who have never been chosen before at KRG were selected from the Soviet Union, Syria, Spain and England.
Galich performing his poem about Pasternak with guitar accompaniment
The Soviet Union was an especially difficult place for poets — recall Osip Mandelstam who said:
Poetry is respected only in this country – people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for poetry.
Mandelstam didn’t survive Stalin’s wrath for writing veiled unflattering verses referring to the dictator. Galich, born in Moscow but living in Sebastopol in Crimea, was more circumspect. Once he knew he was in the bad books of the official Union of Soviet Writers, being expelled from it in late 1971, he made his way out, emigrated, and lived to see his satirical poems published from exile in Western Europe. However, he came to grief by electrocution under suspicious circumstances, verifying once again the dictum of Mandelstam and the long reach of the NKVD (now called the KGB).
The poet Noor Akram Al-Hariri
Noor Akram Al-Hariri is a Syrian poet and refugee living in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. The Zaatari refugee camp is the world's largest camp for Syrian refugees, located in the Mafraq Governorate of Jordan, just 10 km from the Syrian border. Established in July 2012, it has transformed from a temporary tent settlement into a semi-permanent urban-style community that currently hosts 50,000 residents, a mere 10% of the Syrians that Jordan has provided refuge to. Here is a reel showing her writing and speaking from the camp where she lives:
Noor is not known for many poems. Indeed apart from this one poem Pamela chose which deals with her feelings of exile from Syria to Jordan (where many of her exiled compatriots live), we know of no other poem of hers. Is she a serious poet or a poster-girl chosen by UNHCR to highlight the plight of refugees? Though she has written a book = I Am a Refugee – which documents the daily struggles, memories, and hopes of the displaced people she encountered living in the Zaatari camp, this blogger could discover no other poem by her.
The sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in the desert housing 50,000 people (BBC)
In the BBC news site below you can see a video of the Zaatari refugee camp from the air. Chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet reports from Jordan on the scale of the crisis from a helicopter flying over the camp.
The manuscript page in Lorca's hand with the poem La Raiz Amarga – on the reverse was the newly discovered poem Canta el reloj
Lorca was an accidental find by Joe who came across a news item in The Guardian newspaper online on April 18 about the unearthing of a manuscript page containing a known poem on the recto, and a never before seen poem of Lorca on the verso – just 6 lines, which had lain undiscovered for 93 years after it was published! So a fresh translation into English was fashioned and here you can read it for the first time.
Smart Devices is a collection by Carol Rumens of 52 of her Poem of the Week columns from The Guardian
Another poet, Carol Rumens, whose life work has been the presentation and popularisation of hundreds of poets and poems over 20 years in her column titled Poem of the Week in The Guardian, was herself featured as a poet with a sample titled The Émigrée, just one among hundreds of her poems. She published 20 volumes of poetry between 1973 and 2024.
Besides you will meet in this account of our session celebrated poets like Walt Whitman (Passage to India) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (God’s Grandeur). The WWI war poet and essayist, Edward Thomas, is represented by an appealing poem (The Unknown Bird). Kavita chose a favourite of hers, Ada Limón, the Latina poet laureate of the United States for 3 years until April 2025. And lastly, Robert Macfarlane who combined with the illustrator Jackie Morris to produce an admirable book of nature poetry!
The Lost Words, cover of book by Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris
Full Account and Record of the Reading
Arundhaty – 2 poems by by Robert Macfarlane
Here is an excerpt from the preface of the book of nature poems called The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated byJackie Morris..
“This is a book of spells to be spoken aloud. It tells its stories and sings its songs in paint and word. Here you will find incantations and summoning charms, spells that protect and spells that protest, tongue-twisters, blessings, lullabies and psalms. Here you might stop with a swallow, follow a seal through the sea or sky-race with swifts. Here you can listen with ears and watch with the eyes of an oak. Here a fox might witch into your mind, or flicks of moths may lift from the page to fill the air.
Loss is the time of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear. Creatures, places and words disappear, day after day, year on year. But there has always been singing in dark times – and wonder is needed now more than ever. ‘To enchant’ means both to make magic and to sing out.
So let these spells ring far and wide; speak their words and seek their art, let the wild world into your eyes, your voice, your heart.”
This book was voted the most beautiful book of the year by UK booksellers in 2016. Arundhaty fell in love with it when she came across it.
Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane bio
Robert Macfarlane is an author of books about nature, places and people.
His notable works include The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017), Underland (2019), and many more. He also coauthored The Lost Words and The Lost Spells.
He was born on 15th of August 1976 in Nottinghamshire, England. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 2017 he received the E. M. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is married to a professor of modern Chinese history and literature, Julia Lovell. They have 3 children. In 2022 and 2024, Macfarlane was among the nominees for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He hobbies are mountain climbing and word collecting. He has a deep interest and involvement with nature. Macfarlane worked on the film Mountain, in collaboration with others. It premiered with a live performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House in June 2017. Mountain became the highest-grossing Australian documentary of all time, and won three Australian Academy Awards.
He has also written for the movie River (2022). With the Oscar-nominated composer Hauschka, Macfarlane made Upstream, a film set in the Cairngorm mountains. Macfarlane's 2012 book Holloway was adapted into a short film shot on Super-8 by the film-maker Adam Scovell.
He has also published many reportage and travel essays in magazines like Granta and Archipelago, as well as numerous introductory essays, and reissues of lost and neglected classics of landscape and nature writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In 2018 Macfarlane co-edited, with Chris Packham and Patrick Barkham, A People's Manifesto For Wildlife, arguing for urgent and large-scale change in Britain's relationship with nature. He has been involved with the Sheffield tree-protectors campaign, fighting the unnecessary felling of thousands of street trees in the city. Macfarlane wrote Heartwood, a poem for the protestors, which was set to music.
He is a founding Trustee of the charity Action For Conservation, which works to inspire a lifelong engagement with conservation in 12–17 year olds working with schools.
Jackie Morris illustrates books and magazines
Jackie Morris bio
Morris was born in Birmingham in 1961. Her family moved to Evesham when she was four. As a child she was told that she couldn't be an artist, but despite this she learned to paint. Morris went to High school at Prince Henry's High School in Evesham, Hereford College of Arts and afterward the Bath Academy of Art.
On leaving college she found work in editorial, illustrating magazines like Radio Times, New Statesman, New Society and Country Living. She worked for years illustrating books and in 2016; she was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal (a British award that annually recognises distinguished illustration in a book for children) for Something About a Bear. The book includes her water colours of different types of bears.
She lives in a small house by the sea in Wales, painting and writing.
Devika – Behind Seven Fences by Alexander Galich
Alexander Galich – 19th October 1918 – 15th December 1977
Alexander Galich is the pseudonym of Ginzburg Alexander Arkadievich. Galich is a pen name, an abbreviation of his last, first and patronymic name.
He was born on the 19th of October in Ukraine into a Jewish family of intellectuals. His father was an Economist and mother worked in a Music Conservatory. Galich’s sharp criticism of the Soviet regime triggered his expulsion from the Union of Soviet writers in 1971. In 1972, like a large number of Soviet Jews, he was baptised into the Orthodox Church. Information about Judaism was scarce and some Jews saw baptism as the only way to re-connect with a spiritual tradition.
Alexander Galich. – Wiki Photo from the Valery Lebedev archive
Alexander Galich was a prominent figure in the Soviet underground guitar poetry movement. Known for his biting political satire Galich’s ballads were never published in the USSR but were widely circulated among the public via bootlegged and home-recorded audio tapes.
In 1974, Alexander Galich was expelled from the Soviet Union. He lived in Norway, Munich and Paris. On the 15th of December 1977, his wife found him electrocuted. A French court concluded that his death was an accident but there is a ground for doubt. His concerts, his new poems and his work for Radio Liberty had infuriated the Soviet authorities. His relatives had been receiving anonymous threats and his wife died soon after, also in suspicious circumstances. According to Galich’s daughter he was murdered by the KGB.
In 1988 he was posthumously reinstated into the Writers and Cinematographers Union. Galich’s first song Lenochka which he composed on the Red Arrow (night train between Moscow and Leningrad), is one of his very first songs, marking his transition from a successful playwright into an underground musical storyteller. Penned in 1961, it established the foundational ironic, narrative style of his future work.
Behind Seven Fences is one of his famous satirical ballads. The poem sharply mocks hypocrisy of the Soviet elite by contrasting the luxurious, isolated lives of top officials with the harsh reality of the ordinary citizens. Behind these fences the favoured elite enjoyed abundant food, watched banned Western movies and had a good time. The poem captures the disillusionment of the post Stalin ‘thaw’, exposing the myth about Soviet equality and revealing the new ruling class as corrupt, paranoid and completely detached from the people they governed,
Behind Seven Fences was translated by Maria Bloshteyn in 1961.
Joe – Two poems of Federico García Lorca
Joe chose Federico García Lorca because he saw an article in The Guardian newspaper in April about the discovery of a new short poem written on the back of a page that had a known poem of his on the front.
The manuscript page in Lorca's hand with the poem La Raiz Amarga – on the reverse was the newly discovered poem Canta el reloj
He decided at once to recite both poems; they are short and very much in his style: terse, evocative of hidden thoughts, and impelling one to discover what lay inside his mind.
Madrid has a statue of García Lorca at the Plaza de Santa Ana
He wrote about himself that “I was born an artist—just as one is born handsome, or lame.” (Yo es que he nacido artista, como el que nace guapo, como el que nace cojo)
Other poets have Muses and Angels who dictate or illumine their verse. He had what he called a ‘duende’ an irrational and sorrowful influence that lived in the root of things and thrived on dark emotions. Duende is a force that can wound, and take possession of the person, and demands sacrifice, according to him. For example in a famous Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a bullfighter whom he loved, he starts the lament:
At five in the afternoon
At the stroke of five
The boy brought the white sheet
at five o’clock
A basket of lime all ready
at five o’clock
The rest was death and only death
at five o’clock
The repetitive strain of five o’clock is like a fatal rhythm, and in the rest of the lament he looks directly at the wound and describes it.
Another poem he called Somnambulist Ballad, opens
Green, I want you green.
Green wind, green branches.
Here green is not the pleasant green of a forest, but a chilling green. As he rides on a horse toward his destination he cries out:
Compadre let me die
decent in my bed
A steel bed if you please
laid with dutch linen
Don't you see the slash
from my breast to my throat
Three hundred dark roses
Lorca in his youth
He had deep friendships in his youth with Salvador Dali, who introduced the world to Surrealism, where bent watches can hang like folded linen on trees. Half the time Lorca was dreaming, even when his eyes were open. For Joe this was a key to interpreting Lorca. For more on Duende, his theory of being inspired by a dark force, see Lorca’s book The Theory and Play of the Duende reviewed at
The full text of the original lecture is available at:
Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Barcelona, 1925
There is something in the Andalusian culture of southern Spain (Granada, Alhambra and its environs) that leads to tragedy and Lorca was a vessel of that tragedy – he wrote many tragedies (he was a playwright too). Even his gacelas (ghazals) which are poems meant to be sung have an undercurrent of mourning and heartbreak.
How lucky Joe was to encounter a double surprise of two short poems at one stroke. The first poem in recto is called Gacela de la raíz amarga (Ghazal on the bitter root). He recited the Spanish text and you can see side-by-side an English translation. The second newly discovered poem on the verso is only 6 lines. Lorca gave it no title as he dashed it off; the first line is Canta el reloj (The clock sings).
Gacela de la raíz amarga sung to guitar accompaniment by Jose Rios
Analysis of Gacela de la raíz amarga (Ghazal of the Bitter Root)
It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful and compact poems in Federico García Lorca’s posthumous collection, Diván del Tamarit (written in the early 1930s and published in 1940).
It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful and compact poems in Federico García Lorca’s posthumous collection, Diván del Tamarit (written in the early 1930s and published in 1940).
The collection draws heavy inspiration from classical Arab-Andalusian poetry. A gacela (ghazal) traditionally explores themes of love, longing, and mysticism. True to Lorca's signature style, however, this traditional form is filtered through a dark, surrealist lens, where love is inseparable from pain and impending doom.
One of its themes depicts Love as an Enemy, subverting the traditional romantic gaze. The final line explicitly addresses the lover:
¡Amor, enemigo mío,
muerde tu raíz amarga!
Love, my enemy,
bite your bitter root!
For Lorca, love is a battleground, not a harbour. It is a consuming force that brings suffering rather than peace.
Throughout the poem, there is a profound sense of claustrophobia and helplessness. The speaker depicts a universe that is vast but rigidly compartmentalised—full of boundaries, closed doors, and walls that trap human desire.
La raiz amarga
The raíz amarga (bitter root) serves as the central symbol. Just as roots are buried deep underground to sustain a plant, bitterness and pain are framed as the invisible foundations of life and love. You cannot have love without the bitter root of suffering. This must have been anchored in the poet’s experience.
Lorca employs dense, avant-garde symbolism to evoke an emotional landscape of agony:
1. The Bitter Root (La raíz amarga): representing the origin of anguish, which stings and chafes.
2. The World of a Thousand Terraces (Mundo de mil terrazas) & A Sky of a Thousand Windows (Cielo de mil ventanas): These images evoke a fragmented, labyrinthine reality. The windows and terraces constantly watch and judge what one desires.
3. The Door of Water (La puerta del agua): Water is a universal symbol of life and fertility, and so it is in Lorca's work. The fact that
not even the smallest hand
breaks the door of water
suggests a spiritual drought, an inability to access emotional relief .
4. A Battle of Livid Bees (Batalla de abejas lívidas): The sky isn't peaceful; it is filled with a swarm of angry ("livid") bees. This image captures anxiety and a sharp, stinging reality.
5. The Freshly Cut Night (Noche recién cortada): Night is treated as a physical entity – the pain of the bitter root is so intense that it hurts the very fabric of time and darkness itself.
The abrupt question in the middle of the poem—
¿Dónde vas, adónde, dónde? ("Where are you going, where, where?")
disrupts the surreal imagery with human panic. It is futile to try to escape the inescapable pain of the root.
The word amarga (bitter) echoes like a tolling bell, a haunting refrain throughout the brief poem. No matter where the mind wanders, it always returns to the bitter root.
The poem is a distillation of Lorca's concept of Duende—the dark, earth-bound creative force heavily tied to death, sorrow, and raw human emotion. The poem argues that human existence and passionate love are fundamentally tied to a subterranean anguish. To love deeply is to swallow the bitter, painful essence of existence.
(This analysis is partly based on helpful comments by the Gemini AI app)
Analysis of Canta el reloj (The clock sings)
Canta el reloj
cuento maquinalmente las horas
da lo mismo las siete que las doce
yo no estoy aquí
es la señal de carne que dejé al irme
para saber mi sitio al regresar.
The clock ticks endlessly
Counting hours mechanically
Matters not if it’s ten or seven
I’m not here even
It marks the place where my body externed
Will know where it must be returned
This short poem arises from a vision of what a ticking clock signifies. As the hours march mechanically, we humans are embedded and trapped in that flow. We can’t escape it, no matter what the hour. It is always carrying us inexorably to a new point in existence. The human is reduced to a mechanical object by the clock, a robot even.
Even in so short a poem you can discern the tyranny of time and the foreboding of death that haunts the poet.
The line yo no estoy aquí (I am not here) seems to dissociate the poet from time. Lorca often wrote about feeling like a ghost in his own life. His physical body might be sitting in a room in Madrid in 1933, but his true essence, his soul, had already drifted away.
But the poet notes that the ticking clock nevertheless provides a fixity: it marks the spot to which you could return, even if you were eviscerated, and passed into a new life, a new space-time:
la señal de carne que dejé al irme
para saber mi sitio al regresar.
Or as Joe translated it:
It marks the place where my body externed
Will know where it must be returned
The poet is reflecting possibly on after-life, and rebelling against the caged feeling we sometimes experience in the world when we are alone. Unlike Marcel Proust whose epochal eight volumes, À la recherche du temps perdu, were a nostalgic rearward look at life, pleasurable and memorable, Lorca was dreaming of a time in the future when he would be disembodied, perhaps, and the clock (with compass) would mark a point in space-time to which he could be returned and resurrected!
Joe read the 2 poems and promised to give a longer biography for the blog. Lorca was born to well-off parents in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, Andalusia, and grew up absorbing the region's rich folklore and flamenco music. He later moved to Madrid’s prestigious Residencia de Estudiantes, where he formed close artistic bonds with icons like Salvador Dalí, the painter who invented Surrealism, and Luis Buñuel, the great film maker. He spent a transformative year studying at Columbia University, New York, produced his work Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York, published 1942). He wrote 3 plays soon his return: Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1933), Yerma (1934), and La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1936).
Lorca was an outspoken liberal and a homosexual. At the onset of the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested by the Fascist militia of Generalissimo Franco, the dictator, imprisoned without trial, and executed by a firing squad in August 1936. His remains were never recovered.
Lorca's life has been the subject of many biographies. His love life and the circumstances of his death have been the occasion for poems, novels, plays, music, dance and opera – not to mention the legal briefs, investigations and countless newspaper articles. Lorca is a subject in himself in the Spanish news.
His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a prosperous farmer, his mother, Vicenta Lorca, a well-read schoolteacher – the extended family included cooks, maids and farmhands. They lived at first in two villages on the Vega of Granada, and then two houses in town near the confluence of the rivers Darro and Genil. Later there was also a country house set in a lovely huerta (an orchard garden) called the Huerta de San Vicente. Federico was born in 1898 and had three younger siblings, his brother, Francisco, and his sisters, Concha and Isabel.
As a child, he fell in love with puppet theatre, and from then on created his own dramas and spectacles, constructing sets, dressing up his friends and siblings to play parts. He did not do well in school; he seems to have been unable to apply his mind to what didn't attract him. And yet, he became deeply knowledgeable about literature and art. He played the piano; he knew all the musical forms and had a vast repertoire. He was an enchanting raconteur. He also made many drawings – playful, pert, surprising, sometimes sad.
Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, founded in 1910, Spain's first cultural centre. Its residents included Lorca, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Severo Ochoa
In his university years, Lorca lived at the now-famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he formed friendships with Dalí and Buñuel. There, and in years to come, he befriended the artists and intellectuals of the day: Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Jorge Guillén, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda, Miguel Hernández, Pedro Salinas, to name the best known.
He wrote and wrote; he worked hard; his father supported him – even covering the costs of his early editions. He was gratified when the Ballads sold thousands of copies, making him Spain's best-selling poet of all time. He was also crushed by Dalí's and Buñuel's rejection of this celebrated work on aesthetic grounds. He had hoped to join them in Paris but he changed his mind. He also learned, at around the same time, that the two of them had made a short film called Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). He knew that they were making fun of him – that he was the dog – though Buñuel denied it. Hoping to escape from his suffering, in 1929 he traveled to New York on a ship, accompanying the renowned professor and liberal thinker Fernando de los Rios, who was also a friend of his father's. He stopped in Cuba on the way home; the journey had lasted a year.
Not long after his return, he founded and directed La Barraca, a university theater that traveled around Spain, bringing the classics to the countryside and cities. He lived in Madrid on the calle Alcalá. He fell in love with the theater's manager, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, who seems to have been the love of his life.
Still a young man, Lorca was celebrated for his plays not only in Spain but also in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico. He traveled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where great audiences cheered him. The plays made real money; he became independent of his father at last.
And then he was assassinated – at age thirty-eight, in Granada, during the late summer of 1936. He was whisked away by members of the fascist Falange that only days before had launched its offensive against the left-leaning Republican government, marking the start of the Spanish Civil War.
When asked about the poet's disappearance, Generalissimo Franco declared that these were “natural accidents of war.” Or as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003 about the Iraq War and widespread looting: “things happen in war. Bad things happen.” During the 40-year fascist regime of Franco, people hesitated to utter Lorca's name in public. His works were first banned and later censored. Homosexuality was also severely criminalised.
Decades later, a man attested that he had buried Lorca in a gulch near an olive grove alongside three others, a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters. The shared grave was dug up, and there was nothing there.
One notices, reading his works, how often Lorca mentions death – and his own death. He seems to have had an uncanny—almost otherworldly-prescience about his destiny.
A distinguished art historian, Juan Ramírez de Lucas, died in 2010, leaving behind a letter and a love poem from Lorca. Half the age of Lorca at the time of their friendship, he had kept the affair hidden for over seventy years. A debate struck up: who was the beloved of the Dark Love Sonnets, Juan Ramírez de Lucas or Rafael Rodríguez Rapún?
These famous sonnets had been “lost” for almost fifty years. Lorca had read them to Pablo Neruda while soaking in a bathtub. After his death, Neruda asked around about them—hailing their greatness; no one seemed to know where they were. (Much of this history is taken from the Introduction to Sarah Arvio's book Poet in Spain, see below)
For a longer biography see the Britannica entry:
Kavita The Raincoat by Ada Limon
Ada Limón (born March 28, 1976) is an American poet. On July 12, 2022, she was named the 24th United States poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress. This made her the first Latina to be Poet Laureate of the United States. She is married to Lucas Marquardt. Limón says she developed a love for poetry in high school. She attended the drama school at the University of Washington where she took many writing courses and went on to receive her MFA from New York University in 2001.
Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate in 2022
Upon graduation, Limón received a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 2003, she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in the same year won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.
To support her writing career, Limón began working in marketing for Condé Nast, the magazine publisher. She quit this job following her stepmother's untimely death, which was a catalyst for Limón to decide to focus on her writing career. After 12 years in New York City, where she worked for various magazines such as Martha Stewart Living, GQ, and Travel + Leisure, Limón now lives in Lexington, Kentucky and in Sonoma, California, where she writes and teaches.
Kavita chose the poem Raincoat which is a poem about the sacrifice of the poet’s mother and her care for her daughter. Ada had a spinal problem and her mom used to take her for her treatment without any complaints, and made the journey pleasant for Ada.
The Raincoat is a conversational poem about the poet realising the parental sacrifice made by her mother. It transitions from a childhood memory of dealing with scoliosis (abnormal, sideways curvature of the spine) to a sudden, adult moment of clarity.
The poem is structured as a single narrative arc, but it splits into two emotional acts:
1. The Childhood Routine (Lines 1–16): The first half focuses on the speaker's medical struggles with a ‘crooked spine.’ The tone here is matter-of-fact but physically evocative. The mother’s actions are ordinary and routine – driving, listening to her daughter sing, etc.
2. The Adult Realisation (Lines 16–25): The word Today marks a sudden transition in the poem. The speaker is now the same age her mother was then. The setting shifts to a present-day drive from ‘yet another spine appointment.’ This adult perspective is what allows the central epiphany to happen.
The core themes are of maternal caring and the self-absorbedness of youth. Limón captures the natural, innocent selfishness of childhood. The speaker sings during the long drives because I thought she liked it. It never occurs to the child that the drive could be a chore, or to ask what she gave up to drive me.
The Raincoat itself is a striking metaphor in which the poem ends. The speaker witnesses a minor, everyday act: a mother giving her daughter a raincoat during a sudden storm.
….. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
For years, the poet viewed her healing and comfort as a ‘marvel’ — a magical stroke of luck. The sudden understanding that she didn't get wet because her mother was the one getting soaked overwhelms her. It was by maternal sacrifice, not luck that she was saved.
Limón is known for her accessible language. She avoids dramatic poetic diction, opting instead for workaday words. Because the language is so unpretentious, the final emotional punch feels earned and deeply relatable. (Some help from Gemini AI has been taken for this analysis)
KumKum The Unknown Bird by Edward Thomas
KumKum read a simple, yet charming poem by Edward Thomas, an observant poet of nature. The poem is titled: The Unknown Bird. One could easily empathise with the sentiment expressed, for we have all heard bird songs fleetingly without being able to identify the bird.
Edward Thomas was a poet, critic, biographer, and essayist. He lived from 1878 to 1917. He was born to Welsh parents who lived in London at the time of his birth. Thomas's childhood with six siblings at his parents' home was not happy. His father was very strict and demanding, Thomas was not ready to submit himself to his father's discipline. His father spent time pursuing his own career in politics and higher learning, while neglecting his duties as a husband and a father. He did not approve of Thomas' choice of a literary career.
Edward Thomas, poet
While still at St. Paul's school, Edward Thomas met the successful journalist James Ashcroft Noble, who aided his early career. With his help Edward Thomas published his first book, The Woodland Life. While he was still a student at Lincoln College in Oxford, Edward Thomas married Noble's daughter Helen. After his marriage, he became a prolific writer because there was an urgency to earn money to support a spouse and a family. He would write about sundry topics. His writing included essays, natural history, criticism, biography, reviews, fiction, etc. Some of his criticism and appreciations demonstrate a deep understanding of literature, but they do not display his gifts as a writer.
He wrote his first poem in 1914, barely three years before his death. Edward Thomas died in the WWI Battle of Arras at the age of 39. The battle became a costly stalemate for both sides and when it ended, the British Third Army and the First Army had suffered about 160,000 casualties and the German 6th Army about 125,000.
Though he had written a lot of prose in different formats, Edward Thomas is remembered today mainly for the 144 poems he wrote in a brief, prolific period between December 1914 and January 1917. He wrote poems purely for pleasure, not tto earn a living.
Incidentally, Edward Thomas started to write poems at the urging of the American poet Robert Frost. The two became friends when Frost spent some time in England.
Thomas wrote poems on war, nature and solitude. He is considered a War Poet, keeping company with men like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and others.
While most of his works focus on the English countryside and personal introspection, his wartime verses are distinguished by their quiet, conversational honesty rather than for glorifying battle. As the Team's Head Brass is one of his best war poems. A speaker, a fallen elm tree, and a ploughman strike up a conversation in the poem.
. . . Have many gone
From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”
“And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.”
Pamela – Homeland by Noor Akram Al-Hariri
Poet bio and commentary - The poem chosen was Homeland by Noor Akram Al-Hariri, a 30 year old Syrian refugee, student and poet who lives in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan with her family. Noor fled the war in Syria with her handicapped husband and two children – a 4-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy. She is a teacher by training and has set up a school in a Syrian refugee settlement offering free classes to the children.
Noor Akram Al-Hariri
When Noor came to Jordan, and joined dozens of families in this settlement, she received a very warm welcome. She says, “People knew that I was a teacher back in Syria and they had hopes that I would start a school. I started with very basic resources. We even used to go to the dump site and gather cardboard to write on instead of notebooks, because the parents were poor. At first I had 15 students, but when parents heard that the school was free, everyone rushed to educate their children.”
"Even though I'm a mother and a wife and have to cook, clean and handle many tiring tasks, I'm very optimistic when it comes to those children,” she says, sitting on the floor of her small tent that turns into a classroom every afternoon. A white board stands in the corner where old pots wait for her to cook the day's main meal.
66% of the Syrian refugee children in Jordan do not go to school, a reality that worries Noor. She says: “Even if you cannot help them financially, you can help them educationally and morally.” She adds: “What encouraged me most was the children's love for school. When I see how happy they are at school, I forget all my tiredness.” Noor believes it is her duty to educate her compatriot children asserting that “Syrians should help Syrians.”
Noor lives in a tent in the sprawling UNHCR Zaatari refugee camp housing 50,000 people
Approximately 12.2 million people are in need in Syria. Oxfam has reached over 1.5 million affected by the Syrian Crisis, spread across Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Women and children have been particularly affected by the violence. What began as an uprising against the long standing regime of President Bashar al Assad in 2011 escalated into a Civil War in Syria. His regime was ousted in 2024. The country is currently under a fragile transitional governance led by Ahmed-al-Sharaa, a former rebel commander, who has served as the president of Syria since 2025. Since early 2026, fighting has flared up again. More than 190,000 people, mostly women and children have been displaced.
Noor stands as a beacon of light in this scenario. The UNHCR has recognised Noor among other refugee poets.
Commentary on the poem Homeland
Pamela chose the first part and the last part of the poem Homeland, as the original piece was too long for the poetry session. The theme of the poem is displacement and the experiences of Noor as a refugee fleeing from her homeland.
Pamela found the following lines very touching:
I did not leave my homeland,
It was my homeland that left my chest,
scattered into a small suitcase,
and a photograph hanging on a wall that no longer stands.
Pamela thought of how she herself would have felt if she was compelled to leave India, with no hope of returning. What an agony it must be to leave one’s home with little hope of reviving one's life. There are so many people who are going through similar experiences.
Saras said that she was touched by the line
women trying to make a kitchen and a life out of canvas,
Pamela also liked the thought in the following lines –
I am here not only to tell a story of exile or displacement.
I am here to say that a homeland is born every time we help one another,
Saras – Section 2 from Passage to India by Walt Whitman
Shoba – Two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins Bio
(born 28th July 1844, died 8th June 1889)
Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest. His concept of sprung rhythm made him an innovator. He developed “sprung rhythm” as an escape from the predictable, conventional meters which he called “running rhythm.” Adhering strictly to regular alternations of stressed and unstressed syllables (as in standard iambic pentameter) would render poetry monotonous, ultimately becoming “same and tame” in his words.
Sprung rhythm functions entirely on the number of stressed syllables per line, ignoring the number of “slack” or unstressed syllables. Each metrical foot begins with a stress and can be followed by anywhere from zero to four unstressed syllables. This way of using syllables results in abrupt, muscular, and unpredictable rhythms that mimic natural human speech. In a way, Hopkins's sprung rhythm can be seen as anticipating much of free verse.
It was only after his death that Robert Bridges, a close confidant, publish Hopkins's poems. By 1930, Hopkins's work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century.
Gerard Manley Hopkins by Thomas C. Bayfield 1866
He was born in Stratford, London, the eldest of nine children of Manley and Catherine Hopkins. His grandfather was a physician and colleague of John Keats at university. His father reviewed poetry for The Times and wrote a novel. His mother was fond of music and reading and other family members were artists and musicians.
Hopkins's first love was painting. His family were Anglican and deeply religious. The family moved to the green spaces of Hampstead Heath, where John Keats had lived 30 years earlier. Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti.
Hopkins went to a boarding school at 10 and then to Oxford, where he forged a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges, later poet laureate of the United Kingdom. Bridges was Hopkins’ closest friend, trusted confidant, and eventual literary executor. The two met as undergraduates at Oxford University in 1863 and maintained a lively, decades-long correspondence until Hopkins's death in 1889.
During his time at Oxford, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins met John Henry Newman, who was a famous Anglican convert to Catholicism, later elevated to Cardinal. Hopkins also wished to convert. Hopkins traveled to the Birmingham Oratory in September 1866, and later Newman formally received him into the Roman Catholic Church on October 21, 1866. A week later, Hopkins made a bonfire of his poetry because he believed writing secular verse would interfere with his religious vocation. Preparing to become a Jesuit priest, he sought spiritual simplicity and felt that his art was a self-focused, worldly indulgence. He did not write poetry again for seven years.
When felt a call to enter the ministry he decided to enter the Jesuit order. Hopkins chose the austere side of Jesuit life and was gloomy at times. His family found it hard to accept his decision and there was some estrangement between them.
In 1875, he took up poetry once more to write a lengthy piece, The Wreck of Deutschland, inspired by the Deutschland incident, a maritime disaster in which 157 people died, including five Franciscan nuns.
His biographer Robert Bernard Martin notes the curious fact that, the life expectancy of a man becoming a novice at 21 was only 23 more years compared to 40 years for males in the general population.
In 1877, he wrote God's Grandeur, an array of sonnets that included the Starlight Night. He finished the poem Windhover a few months before his ordination.
He took up teaching, working in colleges in London, England and lastly at the University College of Dublin. He felt isolated in Ireland. He disagreed with the nationalist politics because as an Englishman he did not approve of the Irish desire for self-rule. He disliked the general ambiance there.
Hopkins was only five feet two in stature and had personal oddities that reduced his effectiveness as a teacher. He wrote his so called ‘terrible sonnets’ in this period. They reflect his melancholic dejection and their primary subject is terror, agony, and spiritual desolation.
He died of typhoid in 1899 at 44 years of age. His last words were: ‘I am so happy, I am so happy.’
Analysis of the poem God’s Grandeur
The sonnet God's Grandeur (written in 1877, published posthumously in 1918) explores the relationship between God, nature, and humanity. The poem laments humanity’s destructive treatment of the natural world while affirming that God's creative power remains undiminished. It is one of Hopkins' finest expressions of his belief that the divine presence shines through all creation.
The opening declaration sets the poem's central idea:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
– charged suggests that the world is filled or saturated with God's glory. Hopkins sees nature as alive with spiritual power. God's grandeur is not distant, but infused into every part of creation.
The following comparison strengthens this idea:
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.
The image of sunlight flashing from crumpled metal foil conveys sudden brilliance and dazzling beauty. God's glory reveals itself unexpectedly in moments of intense natural beauty.
Another theme is humanity being disconnected from Nature
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
‘Reck’ means ‘heed.’ Despite God's obvious presence, humanity ignores divine authority.
Hopkins then describes industrial civilisation having despoiled nature:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
The following lines intensify this criticism:
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
The triple sequence of harsh participles (seared, bleared, smeared) suggests pollution, exploitation, and exhaustion, and a scarring of the landscape.
Hopkins however, underscores the resilience of Nature. Although humans have ruined creation, Hopkins insists that nature will restore itself:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
These soothing lines suggests that beneath the visible damage God's creative energy continues to sustain creation from within.
The Holy Spirit is at work in Nature, an almost mystical idea which is suggested by one of Hopkins' most memorable images:
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The Holy Spirit is presented as a protective bird sheltering the world beneath its wings.
The final exclamation ("ah!") expresses awe and emotional certainty.
God's Grandeur is in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. In the Octave (lines 1–8) God's glory is contrasted with humanity’s exploitative destruction. The Volta or reversal in occurs in line 9: “And for all this...” In the final Sestet (lines 9–14) Nature's renewal through the guardianship of the Holy Spirit is anticipated.
The sonnet moves from despair to affirmation.
Sprung Rhythm, a characteristic of Hopkins’ style can be in the vigorous, energetic language of phrases like:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod.
The rhythm mimics relentless human movement. He also often uses Alliteration to heighten musicality:
seared... trade
bleared, smeared
brown brink
The repeated consonants reinforce the harsh ideas he is expressing, while softer sounds accompany renewal:
dearest freshness deep down things
The contrast in sound mirrors the contrast between destruction and regeneration.
Being a Jesuit priest, it was natural that Hopkins wrote poetry with a religious significance. He believed in the notion that every created thing possessed inscape which is its unique God-given identity – and instress, the divine force that holds it together and reveals its individuality.
God's Grandeur expresses this belief directly. Nature is not merely beautiful; it is a revelation of God.
God's Grandeur is both an environmental and spiritual poem. Long before modern ecological concerns, Hopkins recognised the damage caused by industrialisation and commercial exploitation. Yet the poem is ultimately hopeful. The sonnet's enduring power lies in its fusion of intense sensory imagery, innovative poetic technique, and profound religious conviction, presenting nature as a living testament to God's enduring presence.
(Some help from Gemini AI has been invoked in the above analysis)
Zakia – The Émigrée by Carol Rumens
Poet Bio of Carol Rumens
Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill South London in 1944. She won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar school and later studied philosophy in London University but left before completing her degree. She pursued a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.
Carol married David Rumens in 1965 and had two daughters. Rumens’ poems were published across more than a dozen collections including Animal People, De Chirico’s Threads and Blind Spots. She describes herself as simply someone who loves languages and tries to make various things with it – poems chiefly, but also essays, plays, fiction, criticism and poetry in translation.
Carol Rumens from her website carolrumens.co.uk
She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer prize for her poetry and was a joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award . The author of 14 collections of poems, she published a weekly column in The Guardian newspaper called Poem of the Week starting October 2007. Over the two decades she developed an engaged and faithful readership, including many KRG readers.
She had been diagnosed of brain tumour, and died at the age of 81 on 25th April 2026. Here is her Obituary from The Guardian.
The Émigrée is taken from Carol Rumen’s Thinking of Skins collection published in1993. It explores the perspective of an adult woman who was forced to flee her war torn homeland as a child. Despite facing physical exile and social rejection she maintains a glowing and indestructible memory of her native city. The poem begins with memories of a country the poet-observer left as a child. Whatever news the speaker receives of this country cannot detract from the impression of sunlight she associates inseparably with that place. The poem doesn’t have a regular rhythm which reflects the confusion of positive and negative feelings felt by the speaker.
The Poems
Arundhaty – 2 poems by by Robert Macfarlane
from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jacky Morris
SWIFTS
Spin, world, spin!
Swifts are here again,
shredding the sky in
their hooligan gangs;
those handbrake-turners,
those wheelie-pullers,
those firers-up of
the afterburners,
so –
Whirl, birds, whirl!
You havoc-wreakers,
thrill-seekers, you
gung-ho joy-bringers,
spring-harbingers,
you drifting, gliding
sleep-on-the-wingers,
so –
Imagine, now, imagine!
Just how far and fast
these Swifts have
flown to be here;
the deserts crossed
non-stop, the seas
traversed, the mountain
ranges spanned,
so –
Fly, heart, fly!
Follow Swifts on their
screaming tours to
flicker far out over ocean,
hunt a storm-cell’s
shifting edge or pierce
a cloud’s slow-motion,
so –
Think, now, think!
If one year Swifts
did not appear:
the sky unriven,
rooftops silent, all
the watchers waiting,
hoping for a gift
that stays ungiven,
so –
Spin, world, spin, and
send Swifts back
and back and back
to us again!
OAK
Out on the hill, old Oak still stands:
stag-headed, fire-struck, bare-crowned,
stubbornly holding its ground.
Poplar is the whispering tree,
Rowan is the sheltering tree,
Willow is the weeping tree –
and Oak is the waiting tree.
Three hundred years to grow,
three hundred more to thrive,
three hundred years to die –
nine hundred years alive.
Ancient Oak hears with ancient ears,
sees with ancient eyes; the snow
of another winter, the glow of a
new sunrise.
Birch is the watching tree,
Cherry is the giving tree,
Ash is the burning tree –
and Oak is the waiting tree.
Three hundred years to grow,
three hundred more to thrive,
three hundred years to die –
nine hundred years alive.
Knot shows through silver grain,
silver grain through bark;
but each fresh spring brings
oak-green leaves again.
Holly is the witching tree,
Beech is the writing tree,
Elder is the quickening tree –
and Oak is the waiting tree.
Three hundred years to grow,
three hundred more to thrive,
three hundred years to die –
nine hundred years alive.
Devika – Behind Seven Fences by Alexander Galich
We rode out into the country,
Far away from dirt and grime,
There we saw the fenced-in houses,
Where our leaders spend their time!
There the grass is greener,
and the air is clear!
There they’ve got mint candies,
truffles and eclairs!
Behind seven fences,
under seven seals,
there they crunch mint candies,
after fancy meals!
They’ve got flora, they’ve got fauna,
they’ve got caviar and drinks,
but if you as much peek in,
you’ll be picked up by their finks.
Guards patrol the fences
in civilian duds,
while Stalin’s loyal comrades,
chew their shish kebabs (shashlik?).
Behind seven fences,
locked by seven locks.
Stalin’s favourite comrades,
chew their shish kebabs!
But when it’s fun they’re after,
as Stalin’s high command.
they get to screen the movies,
that they themselves have banned.
And they all breathe heavily,
as they stare up at the screen:
‘cause they like the raunchy blonde
that looks just like Marilyn.
Behind seven fences,
under seven seals,
they sure like the raunchy blonde
that looks just like Marilyn!
We walked about a while
round the fences in the rain,
then we sighed at one another
and took the homebound train.
As we rode the train back
we heard a radio talk
on democratic freedoms
enjoyed by Soviet folks.
But behind the seven fences,
locked by seven locks,
they were too busy feasting
to hear that radio talk!
(From The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry)
Joe – Two poems of Federico García Lorca
1. De la raíz amarga
Hay una raíz amarga
y un mundo de mil terrazas.
Ni la mano más pequeña
quiebra la puerta del agua.
¿Dónde vas, adónde, dónde?
Hay un cielo de mil ventanas
– batalla de abejas lívidas –
y hay una raíz amarga.
Amarga.
Duele en la planta del pie,
el interior de la cara,
y duele en el tronco fresco
de noche recién cortada.
¡Amor, Enemigo mío,
muerde tu raíz amarga!
There is a bitter root
and a world of a thousand terraces.
Not even the smallest hand
Can break the wall of water.
Where are you going? To where? Where?
There is a heaven with a thousand windows
– at odds with angry bees –
and there is a bitter root.
Bitter.
It pierces the sole of the foot,
reaches out from behind the eyes
and can make the young in body fold
as fully as night devours the skies.
Love! My enemy –
it bites, your bitter root!
2. Canta el reloj
Canta el reloj
cuento maquinalmente las horas
da lo mismo las siete que las doce
yo no estoy aquí
es la señal de carne que dejé al irme
para saber mi sitio al regresar.
The clock ticks endlessly
Counting hours mechanically
Matters not if it’s ten or seven
I’m not here even
It marks the place where my body externed
Will know where it must be returned
Kavita The Raincoat by Ada Limon
When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five-minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
KumKum The Unknown Bird by Edward Thomas
Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off—
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is—I told men
What I had heard.
I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
Pamela – Homeland by Noor Akram Al-Hariri
Peace be upon you. I am Noor, a daughter of Syria, a country still carrying its wounds.
I speak with a shared dream of peace,
and with the common pain of displacement
felt by millions across our region —
from Syria to Sudan,
from Yemen to Palestine,
and every place where families have been forced to leave their homes.
I bring with me the voices of the people — children, mothers, and the elderly — to say that despite all the pain, we still dream of a homeland that is worthy of us all.
I did not leave my homeland…
It was my homeland that left my chest,
scattered into a small suitcase
and a photograph hanging on a wall that no longer stands.
From Syria, I carry things that cannot be forgotten:
my father’s voice waking us for dawn prayer,
my neighbor’s laughter as she knocked on my door with a piece of warm bread,
and the scent of the school where I once dreamed of continuing my path.
All of that remained in my heart, even as I left with tearful eyes.
When I arrived in Jordan, I carried a light bag —
but the weight of the world was on my shoulders.
The first tent in the camp felt cold and silent,
until I looked around and found faces that mirrored my own:
children running barefoot on the dirt,
women trying to make a kitchen and a life out of canvas,
elders sitting at the tent doors, their eyes fixed on what lay beyond the border.
In the camp, I learned that a school is not just walls.
I saw children writing in notebooks torn apart by the wind,
yet they wrote with determination — as if education were the last window of hope.
I saw mothers baking over small fires,
proving that hunger can be defeated with love.
I saw the elderly telling stories of home every evening,
so that the homeland would remain alive in the memory of a new generation.
Following years of devastating conflict, everything changed…
The house was no longer a home, and the road was no longer a road.
The destruction was immense — walls toppled, streets erased — but strangely, my heart grew wider.
I came to understand that a homeland is not only drawn on maps.
It also lives in our ability to carry it within our hearts,
to plant its seeds again, even in foreign soil, and to let it blossom anew.
Today, I am a writer.
I dream of continuing my studies in law,
so I can become a voice for those who are silenced,
a defender of human dignity when it is stripped away.
I want to write for those who had no one to write for them —
for the children who are growing up in tents instead of playgrounds,
for the women who build hope out of ashes,
for the elderly who teach us every day that longing for home is not weakness,
but a strength that keeps us alive.
From beneath the rubble, a small blade of grass pushes through.
It reminds us that hope is not a luxury,
but a condition for survival, a necessity of life.
That single green shoot whispers that no matter how heavy the ruins are,
the earth still breathes, and so do we.
I am here not only to tell a story of exile or displacement.
I am here to say that a homeland is born every time we help one another,
every time a hand is extended in kindness,
every time a heart is opened in compassion,
every time we choose to believe that human life is more precious than destruction.
So return to us our homeland —
not as it once was, but as we dream it can be:
a homeland worthy of our tears,
worthy of our sacrifices,
and worthy of our ability to rise again,
no matter how many times we fall.
I speak with a shared dream of peace,
and with the common pain of displacement
felt by millions across our region —
from Syria to Sudan,
from Yemen to Palestine,
and every place where families have been forced to leave their homes.
I bring with me the voices of the people — children, mothers, and the elderly — to say that despite all the pain, we still dream of a homeland that is worthy of us all.
I did not leave my homeland…
It was my homeland that left my chest,
scattered into a small suitcase
and a photograph hanging on a wall that no longer stands.
From Syria, I carry things that cannot be forgotten:
my father’s voice waking us for dawn prayer,
my neighbor’s laughter as she knocked on my door with a piece of warm bread,
and the scent of the school where I once dreamed of continuing my path.
All of that remained in my heart, even as I left with tearful eyes.
When I arrived in Jordan, I carried a light bag —
but the weight of the world was on my shoulders.
The first tent in the camp felt cold and silent,
until I looked around and found faces that mirrored my own:
children running barefoot on the dirt,
women trying to make a kitchen and a life out of canvas,
elders sitting at the tent doors, their eyes fixed on what lay beyond the border.
In the camp, I learned that a school is not just walls.
I saw children writing in notebooks torn apart by the wind,
yet they wrote with determination — as if education were the last window of hope.
I saw mothers baking over small fires,
proving that hunger can be defeated with love.
I saw the elderly telling stories of home every evening,
so that the homeland would remain alive in the memory of a new generation.
Following years of devastating conflict, everything changed…
The house was no longer a home, and the road was no longer a road.
The destruction was immense — walls toppled, streets erased — but strangely, my heart grew wider.
I came to understand that a homeland is not only drawn on maps.
It also lives in our ability to carry it within our hearts,
to plant its seeds again, even in foreign soil, and to let it blossom anew.
Today, I am a writer.
I dream of continuing my studies in law,
so I can become a voice for those who are silenced,
a defender of human dignity when it is stripped away.
I want to write for those who had no one to write for them —
for the children who are growing up in tents instead of playgrounds,
for the women who build hope out of ashes,
for the elderly who teach us every day that longing for home is not weakness,
but a strength that keeps us alive.
From beneath the rubble, a small blade of grass pushes through.
It reminds us that hope is not a luxury,
but a condition for survival, a necessity of life.
That single green shoot whispers that no matter how heavy the ruins are,
the earth still breathes, and so do we.
I am here not only to tell a story of exile or displacement.
I am here to say that a homeland is born every time we help one another,
every time a hand is extended in kindness,
every time a heart is opened in compassion,
every time we choose to believe that human life is more precious than destruction.
So return to us our homeland —
not as it once was, but as we dream it can be:
a homeland worthy of our tears,
worthy of our sacrifices,
and worthy of our ability to rise again,
no matter how many times we fall.
(Translated by a UNHCR team from the original Arabic)
Saras – Section 2 from Passage to India by Walt Whitman
Passage O soul to India!
Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.
Not you alone, proud truths of the world,
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science,
But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables,
The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,
The deep diving bibles and legends,
The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;
O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun!
O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven!
You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold!
Towers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams!
You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest!
You too with joy I sing.
Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
A worship new I sing,
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,
You, not for trade or transportation only,
But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.
Shoba – Two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Binsey Poplars
felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Zakia – The Émigrée by Carol Rumens
The Émigrée (1993)
There once was a country... I left it as a child
but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
for it seems I never saw it in that November
which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.
The worst news I receive of it cannot break
my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,
but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes
glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks
and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.
That child’s vocabulary I carried here
like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.
Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.
It may by now be a lie, banned by the state
but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.
I have no passport, there’s no way back at all
but my city comes to me in its own white plane.
It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;
I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.
My city takes me dancing through the city
of walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.
They accuse me of being dark in their free city.
My city hides behind me. They mutter death,
and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.
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