The sound of falling trees is likened to a cry for help, writes author Gonçalo M. Tavares, with animals emitting distinct calls that resonate through forests, halting urban life as traffic lights dim and darkness abruptly descends due to the sensitivity of electricity to a certain fear frequency found in these ancient cries.
Tavares reflects on poetry composed “with hunched backs” or “on tiptoes, like a ballerina, trying to write the loftiest words from the highest point, as if life were simple and metrical and poetry emerged only from a certain human altitude.”
The writer elaborates further: “Altitude is a word that should apply to humans, not just airplanes or mountains.”
“Indeed, the world is sonorously unwell, and blindness can sometimes be a terrible form of respite,” Tavares comments. “Images start off sick, hobbling and shedding pieces as they progress. The images we receive are tremendously ill, some are terminal; many are contagious: you see them and become stunned, dizzy, mad, acquiring maladies like cirrhosis, syphilis, or gangrene, which you inadvertently present to family like a holiday spectacle.”
In Tavares’ view, “Images are dangerous entities, akin to wolves more than one might suspect; they hunt humans with impatience and boredom, eager to displace them, eager to shock another.”
“And so humans persevere as best as they can, wielding umbrellas against hurricanes or sometimes a book of poetry to place upon the trembling earth during a terrifying earthquake,” he notes.
However, such an earthquake “remains unmoved by the poetry book naively placed on the ground. In the true upheaval of normal life, books, hands, beautiful 16th-century ceilings, entire facades—everything falls, and among the wreckage, the obsessed and the bewildered might spend days trying to recover any poetic original from the ruins, bypassing hands pleading for help and human cries that reflect a desire to live,” Tavares reminds us.
Nonetheless, he concedes, some “obsessed” with poetry “rescue a small book of verses from the rubble of the 21st century, dusting off the volumes, checking if the metaphors remain legible and beautiful, promptly inaugurating a lovely poetry recital with mint tea and crumbly butter cookies, which, like pieces of rubble, are detrimental to cardiac health.”
“Indeed, there is sometimes more metaphorical output in the urgent reality of the day than in the most meticulously bound books,” he argues. “So let us chew on biscuits and images while seated on a drowsy sofa, toasting to a sunset where resolving urgencies becomes beautiful.”
World Poetry Day, adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1999, aims to “honor poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitations, promote the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, and encourage the convergence of poetry with other arts.”
