I hear the silence of the water in every morning walk.
A tree communicates with another tree through its roots and I feel their heart beat as I embrace that tree.
I belong to nature as nature lives under my skin.
I fly with the eagles.
I run with the lions.
I play with the elephants in the mud.
I am a bridge between the perfect and imperfect.
I am the image of the beauty and the dark.
As I am guilty for burning the tree without a warning.
I cut the trees and I make a home.
I eat the fishes on my plate.
I am the most dangerous animal of all and nature keeps supporting me in so many different and extraordinary ways.
That (is) the difference between human and nature.
I am not the creator but i am that little bee that trying for days to put the nectar in the nest of the Queen. I was only a small ant that was looking for food.
I am the perfect and imperfect nature that will become the Dreamland of every living being
I start to forgive this imperfect world and spread a new message of kindness and generosity.
Nature teaches me to be free but not greedy.
To be open but not manipulated.
To be the real me in any circumstances and accept my responsibilities.
Nature only teaches us how we can understand ourselves and become real.
The pureness is not easy but it is not impossible.
EVA Petropoulou Lianou
………
Θέμα: Nature….. translation
_Natura_
Sento il silenzio dell’acqua in ogni passeggiata mattutina.
Un albero comunica con un altro albero attraverso le sue radici e sento il battito del suo cuore mentre abbraccio quell’albero.
Appartengo alla natura perché la natura vive sotto la mia pelle.
Volo con le aquile.
Corro con i leoni.
Gioco con gli elefanti nel fango.
Sono un ponte tra il perfetto e l’imperfetto.
Sono l’immagine della bellezza e dell’oscurità.
Come se fossi colpevole di bruciare l’albero senza preavviso.
Taglio gli alberi e mi costruisco una casa.
Mangio i pesci nel mio piatto.
Sono l’animale più pericoloso di tutti e la natura continua a sostenermi in tanti modi diversi e straordinari.
Questa è la differenza tra l’uomo e la natura.
Non sono il creatore, ma sono quella piccola ape che per giorni ha cercato di porre il nettare nel nido della regina. Ero solo una piccola formica in cerca di cibo.
Sono la natura perfetta e imperfetta che diventerà il mondo dei sogni di ogni essere vivente.
Comincio a perdonare questo mondo imperfetto e a diffondere un nuovo messaggio di gentilezza e generosità.
La natura mi insegna a essere libera ma non avida.
A essere aperta ma non manipolata.
A essere la vera me stessa in ogni circostanza e ad accettare le mie responsabilità.
La natura ci insegna solo come possiamo comprendere noi stessi e diventare una persona vera
There are so many things which turn irrelevant when they become outdated, and are, therefore, dusted out. It is very important for every young man to decide what is of relevance and what has lost it. Prioritizing is a very professional game in the present milieu, and even where things seem to be irrelevant, we make a list of the irrelevant, the more irrelevant and the most irrelevant. The most irrelevant things are considered obsolete, and then consigned to the dustbin. Our minds too have a trash box where we place most of the things which are not required in our daily transactions. Sometimes, when we have time, we sit and delete them.
The Relevantia
What is important for this society and, therefore, relevant? For a common man, the essential issues have often been associated with his living, his survival. When survival is assured, he starts thinking of living beautifully. Aesthetics comes in, when he has free time to think for himself. The third stage which often does not come in the case of majority of people [because the second phase draws on too long] is thinking dutifully. The second phase was the phase of self-decoration, self- enjoyment and self-improvement. In majority of cases, things stop here.
In fact, in case of millions of people, things stop with gaining a capability to make both ends meet. If they have shelter, a wife, a few kids, and work, they are satisfied. They can lead a life of eighty years without thinking a word about others. Religion plays a great role in keeping them subdued, and under fear of the gods, and it makes them do some good deeds also. If they do not think too much, it gives them a coarse happiness too. We can think of those also, who are born in torn families now a days, who do not have a home, who do not have siblings, who do not have complete set of parents, and who do not own a home [living on rent in flats] which means they have no permanent affiliation with any place. They belong to no village, no city, such is this age of transition and trans-movement. Those who are denied these basic certainties of life, often turn loose, and start their forays into the underworld. There is no one to check them. Parents can stop them, but parents, who are victims of this ‘surplus economy’ which denies them essential services, themselves indulge in wrongful deeds, and have no moral authority to stop their kids when they go astray.
What is relevant for the lowest strata? Food and a poisoned mind, against those who have everything. Those who can manage these foundational necessities, have a little bit time at their disposal, in which they try to make their living aesthetically fulfilling. Education, art, culture lend beauty and charm to people who have modest means, coupled with a hazy understanding of what they have and what they have lost. These people are thinking beautifully, and all their efforts are centred at their self.
Thinking Dutifully
The third phase sets in when people start thinking dutifully. If seventy percent people belong to the first category, twenty percent to the second, then only ten percent people are those who belong to the third category, the people who think dutifully. These are the people who have transcended the limiting boundaries of knowledge, and realized their interconnection with the superior forces of creation, which are benefic to all creation including animals, birds, and rivers, winds and mountains.
Darkness
These people know what is darkness. When the light has gone, and you are running for a matchstick, it is not darkness. Darkness is the absence of light. Even when you can see, still there are things which you do not see. This is darkness. If you see injustice before your eyes, and you move forward, this is a cryptic case of darkness. We have within us vast reserves of darkness. Education, knowledge, and all training which makes us insensitive to the created universe, add to the universal darkness.
If we look closely at ourselves, we will see how many of us are living, growing and dying in darkness. Light belongs to the Buddha. Light means you know what is where. If you become aware of your priorities, if you know what is necessary and what is unnecessary, you have light. Knowledge should have this property, but alas! Knowledge, as it is the preferred domain of the Devil, does not let us pass into the domain of light. It closes our mind to impulses which are divine in origin.
The Relevant and the Irrelevant
The milieu in which we are living is not the making of one day or of one person. Year after year, decade after decade, country after country, and leader after leader, have contributed to this collective blindness of human race to the impulses and urges which are divine. Knowledge, books, libraries and teachers are used to check all the sources of inspiration so that the reserves of natural wisdom among the students remain untapped, and ultimately go dry. Finally, we have to decide what is relevant for this milieu which has turned absolutely irreverent to the things which still have divinity around them. Here is a list of the irrelevancies which our young men can skip without hurting their career prospects. Tick out Parents. Tick out Teachers. Respecting parents or being obedient to them, tick it out. Knowledge is the most preferred item on the agenda. Wisdom, a dangerous proposition. Tick it off. Goodness, Honesty, Integrity – all apply brakes on your speed. Tick them out. Remember, this world basks in the glory of power, success, wealth and fame. Good bye to all great traditions of the past which believed in humanity, human dignity, human goodness, and godliness. If you consider yourself a good man, there is fear of your son or daughter moving you in the trash box. Beware!
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky award and Signs Peace Award Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia]] is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision.
Of the rain ~~~~~~~ I am so grateful for the untimely rain And my waiting hours for sunshine For the twittering birds Listening to the most precious song of the hour They speak the glory of each and every flower Which were decorated beautifully With innumerable colorful butterflies And slowly the salt settles somewhere Where someone is lighting the diya every evening Yes the sun will come across gleaming Each and every morning
*Diya – small oil lamp
Cup of my tea
My cup of black tea lacks sugar Tastes so sweet filling me with life in every sip I don’t mix milk in my tea since long Well nothing happens without reason! Is it so ? Perhaps, who knows? I kept on filling one after another Until I realised, it was overflowing On a note rejection often sung in tables of cafeteria Unnoticed in some corner Blotting over the tissue paper So neglected is was every time! Until it became a sweetener So perfect it seemed only when I sipped and continue to sip Just for me!
In his unconditional love, he gave man thought to learn and progress.
Soon thought took over.
The man and woman began to
demand more, anger arose.
Little by little, they began to attack
all that was holy, the love from which
they were made, and the Truth that testified
to their existence. Anger threw
a stone at the truth, unable to bear its
ugly, distorted, evil face.
Then the lie appeared, wanting to humiliate
it and threw another stone.
Not knowing
to defend itself, the Truth sought refuge.
All this was seen by cunning, luring it
out of hiding, offering protection.
Sincere as it was, it believed, made
a mistake and came out. At that moment, Pride and Jealousy appear, now so distraught over their true face that they could not bear. The light is covered by darkness, ashamed of the naked, unprotected truth. Everyone wonders where God is, why the Creator allows everything to happen before His eyes. God is love, He gave us free will. Man is prone to abuse it, he can do whatever he wants for a while, but not for as long as he wants. Light is stronger than darkness, the truth will come out and show itself when the time comes. Until then, we are given free will to reconsider our actions.
Biography
Melita Mely Ratković
Born in Yugoslavia, married, mother of two sons. After the collapse of the state, from one of the former republics there, Croatia, she moved to Serbia, where she still lives today in the city of Novi Sad. She has been engaged in poetry since she was young, she is talented, she studies foreign languages and is engaged in translation.
Translator of Spanish, Portuguese, English, Bengali.
Profession and cultural activity: Literary ambassador of Serbia in Brazil and Spain.
Accredited as an international ambassador of the Circle of the International Chamber of Writers and Artists
CIESART
With the authority to initiate cultural activities authorized by the presidency of the Circle of Cultural Ambassadors in the World, non-profit, for the dissemination of the work, its author and its erudition, especially taking into account the altruism and peace of the people
She participated in the HYPERPOEM Anthology for the Guinness Book of Records
Participated in several anthologies, world heritage.
She was nominated as one of the 50 important women of Europe”
In Rome, Italy, on November 11 and 12, two very important events were held at the Pontifical Antonianum University _ the conference of world literary leaders of the “50 Important Women of Europe” project.
Global Federation of Leadership and High Intelligence
Winning the 2023 “Zheng Nian Cup” Literary Award Third Prize by the Beijing Mindfulness Literature Museum.
The winner
V PLATINUM EAGLE 2024
GLOBAL FEDERATION OF LEADERSHIP AND HIGH INTELLIGENCE
OFFICIAL DIPLOMA
WALHAC World Academy of Literature, Art and Culture
MIL MENTES POR MÉXICO Internacional
World Awards for Excellence
She is an immortal academician of the following academies:
INTERNATIONAL AMBASSADOR OF “GAONES” For Serbia,
(Gaonesa is a literary structure created by writer Edwin Antonio Gaona Salinas from Ecuador
AIAP – ACADEMIA INTERCONTINENTAL de Artistas y Poetas – Brazil
Academia Mundial de Cultura y Literatura AMCL – Brazil
Academia de Música y Literatura Artística – Brazil
Academia Democrática Independiente de Escritores y Poetas – Brazil
Biblioteca Mundial Academia de Letras y Poesía – Brazil
CILA Confraternidad Internacional de Literatura y Artes
Why are these poems called ‘Echoes?” Are you referencing echoes of themes throughout history, or the myth of Echo and Narcissus, or something else?
“The title ‘Echoes’ operates on multiple resonances. In Mandarin, we have a proverb from the Buddhist poet-monk Li Shutong (李叔同) of the late Qing dynasty: ‘A thought that’s constantly in mind comes with an echo in its might.’ This captures how persistent thoughts reverberate through time and consciousness.
For me, poetry exists as a trifecta—history’s weight, mythic truth, and individual experience. These three elements form an indivisible triangle; remove one, and the structure collapses. When this hybrid translates through memory into verse, it becomes an echo—not unlike the relationship between sound and its aftersound, between experience and its poetic afterlife.
The myth of Echo and Narcissus haunts these poems too, particularly in how exile creates a doubling: we speak, but hear our words return transformed by distance. Every poem here is both utterance and return, original cry and its distortion through time.
We make the echo first, in our bodies and memories, before we ever write it down. The page merely catches what’s already reverberating.”
How and why have Lermontov and Akhmatova become your inspirations? What do you see in their works that you admire, and how have you brought that into your own pieces?
I knew this question would come, and even arranging these words brings me to tears—because Lermontov and Akhmatova represent the two chambers of my heart, the systole and diastole of my poetic existence.
Akhmatova embodies the terrible arithmetic of staying. Her choice to remain in Soviet Russia while others fled mirrors my own negotiations with homeland and exile. In ‘Requiem,’ she transforms personal grief—lamenting her imprisoned son—into an indictment of state terror. What strikes me most is her austere precision: barely a league of emotion, yet each line cuts like winter glass. Her contemporaries in the Silver Age either genuflected to power or dissolved into their own despair. She alone maintained that devastating clarity. The Swedish Academy recoiled from giving her the Nobel precisely because her truth was too graphic, too unadorned.
Her sacrifice illuminates my own: the mother tongue I’ve had to half-forfeit (in China, to write freely means surveillance; in the West, to be heard means English); the treasures left behind; the solitude required to build an inner world strong enough for creation. This ‘elegant restraint’ you detect in my work is learned stoicism—a necessary armor. Yet beneath it pulses radical empathy for all exiles, geographic or internal. Though we’ve never met, I hear their scream: ‘I want to live!’
If Akhmatova is my yin—witnessing, enduring, distilling—then Lermontov is pure yang: the romantic who transmutes oppression into fury. Where she documents, he detonates. His ‘The Poet’s dead’ and ‘The Cloud’ demonstrate how anger can become incandescent art. Those unsettling, haunting images in my work? They’re Lermontov’s ghost teaching me that sometimes the only response to injustice is to set the page on fire, even at the cost of forfeiting one’s own homeland to uphold one’s self amidst divisive currents.
Together, they’ve taught me that poetry can be both scalpel and flame, both witness and warrior. In my work, Akhmatova’s ice meets Lermontov’s fire, creating steam—that vapor between staying and leaving, between silence and scream, where my own poems breathe.”
Interesting that you identify Western and traditional Chinese poetic styles and take elements of each into your poems. What has it been like to craft poetry as a bilingual person? Do you compose in English or Mandarin, do you think in both languages as you write? Do you find that languages themselves, and their rhythms, shape the content or structure of your poems?
The chasm between Chinese and English poetic traditions has shaped me profoundly. Chinese poetry luxuriates in indirection—every plum blossom speaks volumes, each bamboo bend carries philosophy. The poet becomes a humble conduit between nature and reader, never presuming to explain what moonlight on water means. We trust the image to carry its own enlightenment. A closing line merely ‘dots the dragon’s eyes’—essential, yes, but the dragon was already alive in the preceding verses.
English poetry, particularly contemporary Western verse, demands the opposite: clarity as virtue, economy as craft. The poet must architect meaning, not merely channel it. During my first three years writing in English, feedback was consistent: ‘Powerful images, moving emotions, but requires multiple readings.’ Even my lightest lines carried what readers called ‘fatalistic gravity’—that ancient Chinese sense that every gesture contains the universe’s weight.
I spent years trying to reconcile these approaches: the Western praise for accessibility versus the Chinese understanding that ‘nature and human are one’ (天人合一). Only through accumulated life experience—exile, loss, resistance—did I find my synthesis. Now I can achieve ‘readability’ without sacrificing depth, can make a vestment ‘smile’ without explaining why, can connect continents through a seagull’s flight rather than abrupt temporal markers.
I compose primarily in English now, partly due to my Western-focused studies, but mostly because writing in my non-native language offers productive estrangement. It forces me to reinvent rather than inherit, to forge new synaptic connections between sound and meaning. When I write, what emerges isn’t English or Mandarin but something pre-linguistic—an unmodified rumble from my core that chooses its own linguistic vessel. In those moments, we touch the pure pulse of living through sound alone.
Language itself has never been my architect—at most, a carpenter smoothing edges or filling gaps. Emotion, urgency, and message determine form. A protest poem might emerge as experimental fragments (like Echo IV’s compact brutality) or as prose poetry (Echo III’s voice flowing like water from one throat to thousands). The content births its own container, not the reverse. This is perhaps my deepest inheritance from both traditions: the Chinese faith that form follows spirit, married to the English insistence that spirit must find communicable form.”
I notice a theme of human suffering at the hands of others: a violent husband and refugees who flee violence and find themselves still marginalized in their new lands. What draws you to those themes?
It’s a delicate and profound question. I’m drawn to these themes because I’m deeply intrigued by how systems can deform individuals, transforming ordinary or even decent human beings into figures capable of profound cruelty. Often, an individual’s personal agency is eroded or contested when societal structures thrive upon their trauma or tacitly condone violence. To explore this phenomenon further, one must investigate educational, cultural, and economic factors that silently breed violence and perpetuate suffering.
Crime and tragedy serve as the quietest yet deepest reflections of a society’s wounds—visible only to those who dare look closely. Similarly, the experiences of refugees reveal another dimension of these wounds. Throughout seven years living in the UK, I’ve formed friendships with individuals from diverse global backgrounds. Their narratives of familial histories in London, wars in their homelands, and the existential struggles of reconciling dreams with harsh realities have profoundly impacted me. I’ve realized that we all inhabit a liminal space between war and peace, where understanding and empathy are always possible if we actively listen, both to ourselves and to the voices around us.
Ultimately, my poetry aspires to provide solace, however fleeting, to those who feel exiled or alienated, offering a momentary sense of belonging or home within the shared recognition of our collective struggle.
You mention in your author’s note that “nature is also a teacher.” How do the natural motifs and the natural world function in your poems?
Nature serves as both messenger and medium. Whenever I encounter emotions too visceral for straightforward speech, I invite the natural world to translate. Trees, flowers, and coastlines vibrate on the same frequency as those gut‑level feelings, bridging the space between stanzas—and between reader and poet.
Nature also acts as a critical mirror: it reveals that the so-called “survival codes” running through our societies did not blossom from some higher ethical soil but from the stark physics of scarcity and fear. By foregrounding that origin, I aim to question whether these codes are immutable or merely inherited habits we’ve yet to dismantle. When I return to the image of a red beacon strobing across a storm-dark shoreline, I’m less interested in its drama than in its dual function—how a safeguard doubles as a boundary, how protection can slip into quiet temptation to what’s beyond. In that uneasy glow, I probe the complicity between safety and sanguine, asking what the comfort of eternity cost and how the sense aliveness ultimately pays toll of solitude without regret.
Do you think your writing has changed over time? How would you describe your style, and how you’ve developed it?
Absolutely. Writing evolves like any living organism. My first English poems were dense with elusive imagery, and my abandoned early novel—steeped in Woolfian stream-of-consciousness—never balanced character and plot in a way that felt authentic to me at nineteen.
Since then, I’ve forged a dialogue between poetry and prose. Poetry lends my novels an unshakable moral backbone, distilling complex ideas into crystalline sentences that anchor entire volumes. Novel-writing, in turn, lets me dissect psychology in slow motion, testing poetic abstractions inside fully realized narrative worlds. The result is a style that marries lyrical precision with narrative clarity, allowing abstraction and realism to coexist on the page.
What are you writing now, and where do you hope writing will take you in the future?
I’m currently developing a work of literary fiction that grows directly out of the remnants of my earlier, shelved Woolf‑inspired experiment. Rooted in Eastern European culture, literature, and the region’s stark natural landscapes, the novel filters wider Eurasian geopolitics through the intimate lens of a single life. At the center lies a decent man whose unhealed trauma becomes the very fuel a rigid system uses to reshape him, asking: When the machinery of power profits from pain, how much freedom of choice truly remains?
Alongside his story runs that of a woman determined to carve and protect a private sanctuary—“a room of her own”—in a world where every pane of glass has been forged by the system that would surveil her. Their intertwined narratives let me probe two core questions: What inner resources does it take for a person to resist the constant pull of manipulation, and what must be sacrificed to guard even a sliver of autonomy?
I hope this project—and whatever follows—will lead me toward sharper, more honest inquiries rather than easy conclusions, using language to expose the complex textures of lived experience and to keep testing the fragile boundaries of individual freedom.
ترجمة الشاعر المصري / أحمد فاروق بيضون
