Poetry

There's this Mexican poet I like very much. Just like most Latin poets, he's got fire in his words and life in his speech. In his Nobel prize lecture in 1990 he said

"Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun"

What is the goal of a poet? What is he seeking in writing his metaphors? Does he want to make a record of the present? Tell others about himself, how he feels and what he thinks? Does he want to change the world?

And why is it that there are people who like and can understand poetry and others who see it as totally useless because they cannot grasp its meanings?

Maybe that's because poetry does not serve an immediate, tangible purpose. It is rather food for the soul and music for the ears, but it does not have a place in the practical ways of mankind. It does not feed you or clothe you. But it makes some of us happy, or sad, or bitter, or nostalgic and sometimes, all of this rolled into one.

Poetry is a world beyond our own, where you need no sleep, no food, no clothes, no money, no car, where you can go every now and then to get some fresh air, some inspiration, some hope, a smile, a peal of laughter, a pinch of hope, and many more, when you need them. And it's always there waiting for you, like a good friend. And you can always go back or move forward, it's never going away. And sometimes, just sometimes, it's within us. Within us all.