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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?
St Patrick born at Dumbarton, David Livingstone (Blantyre), Mary Slessor, Robert Moffat and John Love, spread Christianity across the world.
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