Yesterday, Sunday March 21, 2021, World Poetry Day, which was declared by the UNESCO General Conference - at its 30th session in 1999 in Paris - approved a world day "to honor poets, to promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, to strengthen the rapprochement between poetry and other arts, and to give new recognition to poetry while It continues to bring people together across continents. "

Today, two decades after the UN declaration, some people ask: Is poetry still the art of bringing people together, or has it become the art of celebrating self-pains and fragments, isolating them, and multiplying them by wars, plagues, and mazes?

Arab poets celebrated their World Day through the Facebook platform in a panoramic manner, in which despair was mixed with bewilderment, and the poems of fragmentation and frustration intertwined with poems to restore the past, in an attempt to gather the fragments of the flying spirit throughout, after poetry was helpless in front of the war machine, and its isolation in front of the Corona pandemic, Which took the lives of a number of poets, while some of them miraculously survived, not to mention hundreds of thousands of victims around the globe.

A celebration of poetry and the beauty of the Arabic language, the Syrian poet Ali Ahmed Saeed (Adonis), after an absence from his audience, read his poems electronically, in a digital initiative on the occasion of Poetry Day, coordinated and accomplished by Ninar Esper. The year is the emergence of poetry events on virtual platforms such as Zoom, Facebook, and others.

On the other hand, a state of frustration and defeat appeared that almost speaks for itself, as poetry has become an orphan in spite of the opportunities for appearing and publishing available to poets today, and poetry has proven its inability to be the voice and weapon of humanity to confront wars, disasters and epidemics, according to Arab critics and poets.

In a different initiative, a house of lines and shadows for publishing in Amman distributed congratulatory cards to a number of Arab poets and poets on World Poetry Day, while Arab poets - throughout the past period - were content with publishing their pictures receiving the vaccine in a "Coronian time".

The predominant feature of the poets’s publications remains that it is infused with the language of silence, depression and isolation. Rather, it is unable to provide what saves humanity from the hell of its wars, disasters and epidemics.

Farewell to Facebook

The Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh, who recently won the Arkana Prize, announced on his Facebook page just hours before the celebration of "Poetry Day", that he had left Facebook, and wrote, "Goodbye, Facebook."

At least two days before that, he wrote: "Blood has a tongue, every drop of it says: All mankind has fallen."

Wadih himself published on February 23 what he says about her, "My will that I know my family will not work by" is to burn my corpse, put its ashes in a bowl, and place a gray container on the table in my house in Shabtin.

As for the Iraqi poet residing in the United Kingdom, Abdul Karim Kasid, he published a text recovered from his old texts entitled "Praise", beginning with the preface:

On the occasion of World Poetry Day, the text begins with the phrase “Everyone is retiring,” listing categories and names, including singers, generals, war treasuries, fortune tellers, musicians and lovers, “Except the poet, whispering into the ear of eternity, the old, deaf, his remaining poems.”

"I am not a poet"

“I am not a poet,” so wrote the Moroccan poet who won the Moroccan International Arkana Prize for Poetry, Mohamed Bantelha, on the eve of International Poetry Day, and wrote Bantalha in a not-so-far post on Facebook: “When the merchant becomes bankrupt, he returns to his old notebooks, as well as the poet.”

And in another text, Banthalah recalls what we can say about him: the anxiety of poetry in its extreme adventures, surprisingly in wars and epidemics, today: “Wise as ashes, and wherever I resolved, like the colors of the spectrum, I do not rest, I renew, I am patient, for a while and I violate what I want, off the shores of the language, Oil tanker, under the family's eyelids, a diving gown, and under my eyelids, the Schengen Treaty, the press law. "

And he concludes with Ntalha, "I do not have an email, my hem is a homing pigeon, and all my letters end with the following phrase: Even after all these defeats, I am the victor."

And, quoting Ilya Abu Madi, he publishes in Talhah: “I came not knowing where, but I came, and I saw a way in front of me, so I walked, and I will keep walking, whether I want this or refuse, how did I come,? How did you see my way,? I don’t know!”

Poetic worries

The Moroccan poets and academic critics Salah Boussrif and the Lebanese Charbel Dagher seemed to have taken the occasion of World Poetry Day seriously, with a vision that stems from a decades-long experience of poetry, and a reading that extends to the future as well.

Addressing Arab poetic concerns, not the last of which is the rumors of the death of Abdullah Al-Arwi and Abdel-Aziz Al-Maqaleh, which found their way to social media recently, only to find, unfortunately, those who snatch them through circulation and wailing, while their owners are alive and well;

Bosref wrote in this regard that poetry cannot be a war of positions and rhetoric, "because poetry was not once owned by a party, group, or tribe."

And Bosreef added that the poetry was - always - the falcon that tracks the forest from the tops of the metaphor, or the owl that does not leave a sound behind it, as it releases its wings in the wind, to see with its insight what is blindness in the minds, the imaginary and the eyes.

Bosref assures that poetry is to reside in your solitude, in its fullness, in the shades that the sun has left behind you, do not bother with what is in its gold of light, because you are in poetry;

Either it is light or it is not.

And he continues: If all this talk that takes place outside of poetry was inside him, in his texts and experiments, then the celebration would actually be a celebration of poetry.

Two days before the Poetry Day event, Salah Boussrif wrote expressing his belief that "the most important thing that benefits poetry in all its forms is reading it, contemplating it, studying it, revealing its breakthroughs, and the boldness and discovery in it, and spaces different from what we have known in the prevailing writings, by going to experiments," In the collection of what has been published and issued, and not by readings of plucking and restoration. "

"And if I was alone"

"I am a joy far away, even if I were alone."

So Charbel Dagher wrote, celebrating the occasion.

Under the title “The Wake of a Universe in a Metaphoric Eye,” Dagher wrote that he does not want to complain about the state of poetry, here or there, but rather to celebrate it, as long as each new poem is a new birthday.

Dagher added - on his Facebook page - I want to express my joy in him (meaning poetry), my gratitude to him, for allowing me to be different than who I am.

To be in conditions that I would not have lived without it: I live it in that light or rapid movement over narrow and stifling corridors, I do not fly, but I tamper with all of this, transforming it, from vile to precious.

The deepest thing that hurts me, and the highest that makes me happy, has a different taste, other than a tear or a hiss, has another existence: what delights me like the awakening of a universe in a metaphorical eye, I am a joy far away, even if I am alone.

A lot of questions

And the paranormal scene continues in the event that the World Poetry Day is celebrated by the poets themselves, while the Egyptian poet Abdel-Wahab Al-Sheikh believes that "the greatest celebration of poetry in his day is - in my opinion - by handing over his banner to younger generations who are able to carry it and move further in the way of hospitality to him and his writers." ".

"Without occasion ... what makes poetry more powerful than silence?"

This is how the poet and artist Mahdi al-Nafri asks, in a post on Facebook, and answers: It seems to many readers that the poem is words that fall on the poet like ice beads, but the truth is that every word opens from the writer's arteries, from branches sprouting in his blood, nourishes them with his feelings and narrates them with waves of pain .

Whoever follows much of what Arab poets write today finds himself faced with endless questions, questions of existence and the usefulness of poetry.

However, the Yemeni poet Muhyiddin Jerma, in a language burdened with the burdens and horrors of war, celebrated Poetry Day in his own way, "Poetry does not need a certificate of teething from anyone."

Missing golden ray

In bewilderment, the Syrian poet Wadad Salloum writes, "Death snatches friends from us to make us realize that there is nothing but unity, our eternal companion."

Poet Nyalao Hassan Ayol, from South Sudan, says in Arabic on World Poetry Day, “Next to the old wooden library, I stand, I turn the dusty books, Al-Mutanabi, Ibn Zaidoun, Mai Ziada, Fadwa Toukan, Abdel Sabour, Adonis, Al-Fitouri, Al-Abnoudi, Ismail Wad Hadd Elzen, Milton, Britton, Elliott, Blake, Rambo! ''

And wondering, "Where are you, O golden ray,? The sun farthest from Paris and Ethiopia, the hair after you became like an eagle, rolling over its top, and the earth stands, silently, waiting for its broken claw."

Ahmed Al-Falahi, a Yemeni poet who has lived between Morocco and Sweden for years, continues his texts intersecting with the war, the war that ravages his faraway country (Yemen).

Al-Falahi wrote, "Between the tone of light, and the henna dance, the story of a road, war indicates the seventh, the time of the shell."

He continues, "The homeland was not so clear, a forest of hatred around the pastures, tears, whenever it shone, a fountain of light,. If time was enough, to steal a homeland, smiles, butterflies would have fluttered, on top of a smile, and we were satisfied with the cooel."

A state of repudiation of war - in Al-Falahi's texts - and in exchange for that belonging to the homeland and solidarity with it, he is a "fluttering butterfly" in the soul despite everything.

Glory be to man

Not far away, the Iraqi poet, residing in the United Kingdom, Salah Faiq, celebrated his texts on his own way as one of the most prolific and most important poets on Poetry Day, as he writes a prose poem profusely and in a different way.

Faik finds that March 21 is a day of wonderful coincidences;

Poetry Day, Mother's Day, Nowruz Day, and this despite the Corona disaster in all parts of this world, but we celebrate these occasions despite the epidemic, but "we will prevail in the end. Glory to the human being wherever he is."

The poetical spirit is fragmented in its migrations and in its permanent travel between universes and cliffs. There is an uninterrupted thinking about migration even into the unknown, when imagination breaks out in the way of super goodness. “When I think of migration, to an island or another city, I find mountain deer, on the roads to the airport, Or to a nearby port, cars are parked, and the horses of my area are calm, after I understand these feelings, I respect them: I return to my house, my bag precedes me, my dog ​​appears from a neighbor's house, and there are those who arranged a table for me, full of vegetables and fruits, I do not know who he is.

Troubles and adventures

"Poetry is an individual adventure that someone undertakes, and he has to endure the struggles of this adventure first, and he must not burden others (from him) with his adventure again."

Thus, the Iraqi poet Abdul Azim Finjan seized the opportunity to celebrate poetry on his International Day.

On the page of the late Egyptian poet and translator Mohamed Eid Ibrahim on Facebook, the Algerian poet Anfouan Fouad, who runs the page, quotes Eid Ibrahim: “I do not remember that I ever wanted anything poetry, just a desire to write presses me, so I empty it as my beginnings with love.”

Joy and sadness

Tunisian poet and translator Jamal Al-Jallasi goes away as he celebrates Poetry Day, sad and joyful and beyond that. Al-Jallassi sang: "I have no need for poetry, lakes of poems, stagnant within me, and I conceal what you have confided to me, the small fish, what the silt does, with herbs ... Me from joy, what makes me funeral, and me from sadness, what makes me a carnival.

In the same way of brokenness and grief, the Yemeni poet Qais Abdul-Mughni published a text to his mother, in which he says, “I am going to war, oh my mother, I no longer master the calm of the dead, and I have never had the patience of the slaves, I am going to war, oh mother, because my silence A stab, in the backs of comrades, and my neutrality is more lethal than a bullet. "

Abdel-Moghni concludes with his message, "Nothing like freedom, mom, is worth the wait."