Colonial soldiers, what have they been doing to my poetry all these years when I could have easily killed them in my poems as they’ve killed my family outside poetry? Palestinian poet Ahlam Bsharat wrote the above lines in 2021 in a poem titled ‘ How I Kill Soldiers ’. Poetry in a heartless world may pretend to be heartless too like in these lines. The poet wants to kill just like the soldiers. But poets cannot kill – that’s the fact. They have a heart. Poetry is as much about the heart as war is about armaments and attacks. As much as science is about the brain. Plato wanted to banish poets from his Republic because the philosopher didn’t think poetic passions would do any good to the nation. William Wordsworth told us that poetry is the distil of our refined emotions. T S Eliot, however, brought his sophisticated brain into poetry. We live in a dark world. Dark and evil. Poets are some of the people who bring some light, though feeble and flickering, to that dark
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