Every year World Poetry Day is held on March 21 to celebrate the most treasured cultural and linguistic expression and identity in the form of poems.World Poetry Day is an initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It is a day to appreciate and support poets and poetry around the world. 


Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.  A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, lovesickness. 

On the occasion of World Poetry Day, I am sharing one of the poems I found on the internet.

A black veil covering her remains, kids scurrying away
She watches them laugh, point, she puts on a mask and walks
Bowing her head, holding her agony at bay
Prolonged silence dies on her lips, yet so much left to say
Fragments of mirror on the floor, she puts them in a box.


She uncovers the veil, a scream she swallows, numb
Pictures that hang on the wall, in her eyes a million stories shine
She lightly traces her face, who has she become?
All the blemishes, the fading cicatrices on her thumb
But if these scars could speak, they would utter two syllables- ‘I’m fine

-Maya Angelou -

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.