Unsung Poetry from Unexpected People and Places

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NOTE: not all of the poets and poems mentioned below (of course) are (were) "unsung" in other places and times.



Rushing Water By Farida Samerkhanova

Louder and louder it rumbles and roars
always and always searching for more
as deeper and deeper its awesome force
sears ridges and grooves each day anew
in the once smooth surface of earth.

Banks angle and veer sideways in fear
like a lover at odds with the power of love
and into the void falls undisciplined will
granted for free by the energy, life.

Louder and louder, faster and faster,
and I, hypnotized, look deeper and deep
and see how love in the face of turmoil
sinks and joins voice with life’s turbulence.

And I search from the base of flat level ground
for the truth of the way humans behave
but joined as I am to humanity,
I tumble and stumble, fall, plummet down.

Aided I rise from despair to new heights
preserved and intact from beginning to end
for no river can drown innate energy
or cause the demise of one born to free-fall
through life’s turbulence to the safety of “more”!

photo from collection mentioned below under Publishing winners bios

Farida Samerkhanova is a prolific Canadian poet and short story writer. She graduated from Bashkir State University , Russia . English is her third language. She raises her grandson in Toronto, plays chess and writes. More than forty English language literary magazines in USA , Canada , UK and Turkey published Farida’s work.

Find others great in wordplay and content who joined Farida here for this collection:

Publishing winners bios (poets' work and some of their own favorite poets here

Nissim Ezekiel at Old Poetry.com Ezekiel was born in Bombay in an Indian jewish family. ... He was a distinguished scholar. He did his schooling in the missionary schools and ... He became art critic of the Times of India (1964-66) and edited Poetry India (1966-67). While he's new to me, I'm smitten by this one:

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher By Nissim Ezekiel

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.


Nissim Ezekiel (I found this delightful image at Wikipedia)

The comment underneath this poem title is on the following site. Somehow, I was imagining the poem as applied to poets and didn't consider the points related to someone seeking to "win" a woman...yet found this analysis most interesting. As with many larger classical poems, this one can certainly be seen on several levels at once. To read the comment and see more from Nissim Ezekiel GO here

By the way, there are some wonderfully evocative, challenging and surprising lines among the poets who read and talk of poetry and life on Morning Edition NPR.org for the beginning of many folk's Good Friday...take a look here

What poems here or anywhere do you like?

* the image of pen above was one I found at the poetry edition of NPR.org today