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Sharon Lindeman
USA
Why write poetry?
A friend can come and go. Places and situations change. A poem is like the dearest friend that is always there. They are eternal and they tap into a place deep within like the line "Human voices wake us, and we drown" by T.S. Eliot. This is why I love, read and write poetry.
Who were your influences?
My first influence was Robert Louis Stevenson and "A Child's Garden of Verses".
I loved this book as a child and then also I loved Eugene Field's "The Sugarplum Tree" and Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat".
I also loved anything by William Allingham, especially "The Swing" and "The Fairies" and Christina Rossetti's "Who Has Seen The Wind?".
Then I came to love so many other poets including Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Donne, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Coleridge, Poe, Verlaine, Byron, Burns, Blake, Roethke, Li-Young Lee, Wu Tu, Lao Tzu, Li Po, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Tu Fu, Rumi, Hafiz, Tagore, Abhinabha, and a new discovery for me, Sarojini Naidu, who was called the "nightingale of India".
There are so many amazing poets, but for me I find it can take only one or two lines or even a couple of words from someone's poem that captures my imagination.
It is often that I just re-read those lines over and over again.
What is your favourite poetic verse?
I have more than one. This is one of them from Sarojini Naidu.
Cradle Song
From groves of spice,
O'er fields of rice
Athwart the lotus-stream,
I bring for you,
Aglint with dew,
A little lovely dream.
Sweet, shut your eyes,
The wild fire-flies
Dance through the fairy neem;
From the poppy-bole
for you I stole
A little lovely dream.
Dear eyes, good night,
In golden llight
The stars around you gleam;
On you I Press
With soft caress
A little lovely dream.
Examples of poetry.
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Who are the Scots?
Mary Slessor
(1848 - 1915)
Born in Dundee, worked in the mills there, then became a missionary in West Africa. The Nigerians named her 'Great Mother', because of her contribution to the provision of health care and education for them. She was very influential in helping to eliminate such tribal practices as human sacrifice.
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