Today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom – a celebration of the power of verse to bring people together. Thousands of events have been planned, in schools, bookshops, libraries, on trains and buses and in hospitals.
Why poetry? Well, poet Dan Celotti sums it up; poetry “offers no answers, no advice, no cures, just understanding and love and timing. Read poetry because the world is more than the facts of the world”.
And if you’re looking for an illustration of what he means, read Imtiaz Dharker’s extraordinary poem:
Front Door
Wherever I have lived, walking out of the front door every morning
means crossing over
to a foreign country.
One language inside the house, another out.
The food and clothes
and customs change.
The fingers on my hand turn into forks.
I call it adaptation
when my tongue switches
from one grammar to another, but the truth is I’m addicted now, high on the rush
of daily displacement,
speeding to a different time zone, heading into altered weather, landing as another person.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re on the same trip too.
Reproduced on the website https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk, with kind permission of the author and Bloodaxe Books.
travelling frogs 