[Credit for the Images: Summer Anne Burton at buzzfeed.com]
* This poem – here still in its raw version – will re-appear in An Aegean Breeze of Peace, a pending book of poetry, being currently co-authored by Dr. Demetrios Trifiatis (Greece) and myself (Turkey) to be published by Inner Child Press, Ltd.
What Nazım Hikmet, the world-renowned exilic poet and thinker of Turkey stresses in his call for collective strength in harmony, is as follows: “If you don’t, I don’t, we don’t blaze, how can the darkness emanate light?”
Nazım’s invitation, to me, is one to awareness – a timeless gift to generations to come. If they were to be willing to listen to it, of course. No different than what John Lennon intended with his song, “Imagine”:
The following lyrics – in sync with the rest of the song, seem self-explanatory:
“[…]
Imagine there is no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
living life in peace […]”
These remarkable visionary individuals are no longer among us. We, however, are. I, for one, have found my niche in the sharing of my awareness for this vital thought processing among the living: love for world peace – one I have been yearning for very long. It came to me thanks to the World Healing World Peace Poetry Anthology 2014 initiative by Inner Child Press.
Please know I am writing about this marvelous project not at all because I happen to have a submission of my own. I don’t. I won’t. If I had or were to plan to do so, I would have to step back. Here, I mean. For I have strict self-imposed rules regarding self-promotion. And, you all know how I treat my own work contribution – as you have seen my quite subdued announcement of my poems in an anthology by another publisher.
The conceptualization of world peace by the Inner Child Press is simply me finding home. Through collective poetry creation in order to attract attention across the world, spanning over the boundaries of countries. What a thought! In order to lend a long overdue balance against the power of violence – a trait of our world that has enjoyed dominance for way too long. But, that, is a learned trait. How can it stand – we may respond with a false sense of confidence – against the strength of love, an inborn asset of each human being? It can. It unfortunately can. And it does. It has. It will. As long as we keep letting it.
Emily Hanford
Education Correspondent, American RadioWorks
World Healing World Peace
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Kazım Koyuncu (1971-2005), "Hayde"
A folk-rock singer and song writer with work in a number of languages spoken along the northeastern Black Sea coast of Turkey, as well as the language of Laz.