Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz receives the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
There are still those who think that poetry is a luxury of literature and that it is of no use in times of crisis like the ones the world is currently experiencing in its conjunction between the ballast of pandemics and the uncertainty of the new war in Europe that threatens to go global.
No, it's the other way around, it's in moments of fear and anxiety when the redeeming force of poetry prevails over prose.
And it is that poetry is more than language because it reaches areas of our unconscious and takes us into new dimensions.
Poetry is emotional therapy, it breaks barriers that seemed impregnable.
The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, to the question in Cultural Diagnosis about what poetry could contribute in times as critical as the current one, replied: “I honestly don't know.
All I can tell you is that poetry has helped me live."
And the Spanish poet Carlos Asensio Alonso defined poetry as a “thrown weapon against the oppressor.
As a shield against the pain of the world.
As a refuge and home for the weak.
As a speaker of complaint”.
And is that poetry goes beyond words.
Everything can be poetry, not just words.
It was that cyclamen born in the cement crack in the Auschwitz concentration camp where the cynical phrase "Work ennobles man" is written at the entrance and within the invisible but palpable presence of the shadows of torture and the Holocaust .
That tiny flower next to the barbed wire was a whole poem that didn't need words.
Only poets are capable of putting music, with words, to barbarism.
It is the music that whips the conscience unable to explain so much madness.
Borges said that “poetry is the power of words made music”.
There is a music that caresses and a music that hurts.
Poetry is not only an art, it is also a concept.
Poetry is not only written by poets.
Life is a poem, sometimes flowery and sometimes bloody.
Poetry is life itself with all its reality of light and tragedy, of dark tunnels and valleys dressed in the sun.
The slaves of all times, with the screeching of the chains of their feet and their souls, write a cruel poem in which the words are knives in the conscience.
All the slaveries, all the absences of freedom, that the extreme right of the world tries to revive, are chains that man drags like a symphony of horror capable of frightening the dead.
The words of the poets contain the notes of the music of all times.
In the words of the poets resonate the fears of the abysses and the enjoyment of the joy of the child who frolics on the grass not yet contaminated by fears.
There are realities that only the music of poets are capable of singing.
Prose is not enough.
They are complaints that only poetry gives us, hidden in the gloom of dawn that slashes the windows of the solitary temples of prayer.
Only the music that the poet is capable of creating with words can fathom the mystery of forgiveness, hate or guilt.
And that since ancient times.
The Bible that was oral was written in poetry.
And all the most developed cultures of the past, from the Greek to the Latin, had poets as priests.
Everything sings in the words of the poet: life with its hopes, impossible love, nobility and betrayal.
Only the words of the poet are capable of singing at the same time the emptiness and fertility of life, which is already a poem of horror or sublimation.
A poem that is born in the folds of the soul and takes shape in the dance of pregnant words.
Because every word carries in its flesh the force of life.
Words can prostitute themselves in the mouths of bureaucrats, in the living dead, or resurrect with their original force, from the awakening of creation that announce that life can also be an explosion of happiness.
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