As tradition holds, the literary season closed on a high note with the Derzhavin Poetry Festival on Monday. Let us reflect on the journey.
Since last autumn, ahead of and following the BRICS summit in Kazan, we at Kazan Vedomosti hosted five online sessions with poets from China, India, Egypt, Iran, and Indonesia.
From November to April,
Walking Alone
You come from all directions
Always alone
You walk toward the opposite of your starting point
Not knowing when you’ll return
Walking alone, from childhood to old age
Then from success to failure
Coming from loneliness, and stepping into one’s own glory
Walking alone, humming
My Venice
I’d like to fill my hands
Of your lighter face,
Tie your splendid moons to my wrists
– Ah the beautiful, reflected moons
In the silent becoming -.
I would like to seal in the touch
– And in the lightning, in the tweak –
Waters, petals and birds,
Bending them into spikes
In
Out of 7000 languages on the planet, 700 of them can be found in New York, and many of those are endangered – Samantha Ellis
There is usually a lot of violence and displacement in the stories of these languages becoming endangered.
The monolingual empire drains the energy from other cultures
Samantha Ellis’s book Chopping
In childhood
When we had high fevers
We’d lie in Mother’s arms
Hearing her whisper
“Child, Mama is here with you.”
Ma Zhiyao, a distinguished Professor and Poet from China, shares his poetry
Ma Zhiyao, born in 1971 in Aksu, a small city in Xinjiang, China, is a distinguished Professor and PhD