(o Poetry! ...)

O poetry! ..................... O poet, wearied by the upheavals of time, O silent one, bleeding quietly through the hush— do not grieve. Doubt, cowardice, and racism: three lethal plagues inhabiting the souls of rabid dogs, barking at you without cause. << When the law puts on the face of the executioner, and the distances vanish between innocence and predation, the boars get blind and mistake gazelles for wolves, for their eyes cannot endure the gleam of fangs. << Mandelstam's poem, "The Kremlin Mountaineer, " was whispered only to his companions, yet the whisper itself was laden with death. << In Santiago, inside the Santa María Clinic, after the military coup, it was the tempest of poetry— not cancer— that carried Neruda to his grave. << Had poetry not existed— nor Gumilev— would Akhmatova have sung her Requiem? << Would The Pisan Cantos ever have been born within Saint Elizabeths Hospital? And would the poet have received the Bollingen Prize had inspiration not whispered to him from the depths of suffering? << Still, Bakr Ali bleeds from the mouth of the poem, and the hour of farewell has not yet come. For the difference between him and Lorca is that the echo of his bleeding still reverberates in the throat of the grave. << O Poetry— without you, we would never have known that silence itself could become a flute. .......................... Notes 1. Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) — Russian poet. He died in 1938 in a transit camp near Vladivostok. 2. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) — Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, known as Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who is believed to have been poisoned in hospital only twelve days after the bloody military coup that overthrew his friend, the socialist president Salvador Allende, on September 11,1973, led by General Augusto Pinochet. 3. Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921) — Prominent Russian poet and critic, and one of the founders of the Acmeist school of poetry. He was the husband of the renowned poet Anna Akhmatova. He was executed by Soviet authorities in 1921 on fabricated charges. Their son, Lev Gumilev, spent much of his youth (1938-1956) in Soviet labor camps (the Gulag) because of his family background. 4. The Pisan Cantos — A sequence of poems by Ezra Pound, the celebrated American poet and critic regarded as one of the central figures of literary modernism in the twentieth century. His life became entwined with imprisonment and thirteen years of confinement in psychiatric institutions because of his political positions during World War II. 5. The Bollingen Prize for Poetry — A prestigious American literary award granted every two years to an American poet in recognition of either an outstanding new collection or lifetime achievement. It is administered by Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and is considered among the highest honors in American poetry. 6. Bakr Ali — A poet of the 1980s generation and one of the founders of the Union of the Unemployed in the early 1992s. Following the March Uprising of 1991, he led peaceful demonstrations. He published a single poetry collection, Nights Darker Than Your Hair, only thirty-four pages long. He was arrested on August 16,1994, by the Asayish security forces and imprisoned for six days. On September 1,1994, he was assassinated in Bīsārānī Street in central Sulaymaniyah, shot twice in the mouth while security forces were dispersing a peaceful protest in front of the governorate building.