World Poetry Day

Today is World Poetry Day. How apt - who couldn't use a little poetry in times like these?

World Poetry Day is celebrated on 21 March, and was declared by UNESCO in 1999, "with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard".    - Wikipedia

Why poetry?

•Poetry is a way to explain the inner feelings. 

•Poetry is the explanation of words. 

•Poetry comes from the heart.  

Could it be that poetry can describe truths that other language forms shy away from? Might it counter the use of language to spread the purposeful destruction of truth that we know as propaganda? 

If so, it is worthy of having a designated special day.

And don't you know that one of the endangered languages that is not spoken often enough today is the language of simplicity, thrift, frugality, freedom and slow. 

Hmm, what rhymes with frugality?

Inner pleasure.

Society's brainwash: 

Happiness and Having

Synonymous. 

- Syed Anwar Yarkhan Jilani 

Happiness means

The simplicity

Of life.

- Sri Chinmoy

The Garden Buddha

By Peter Pereira

Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,   

prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.   

Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,   

he gazes forward to the city in the distance—always   

the same bountiful smile upon his portly face.   

Why don’t I share his one-minded happiness?   

The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia,   

filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia   

and yearning.  He’s laughing at me, isn’t he?   

The seasons wheeling despite my photographs   

and notes, my desire to make them pause.   

Is that the lesson?  That stasis, this holding on,   

is not life?  Now I’m smiling, too—the late cherry,   

its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter;   

the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers   

exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.   

Happy World Poetry Day everyone.