PESHAWAR: Poets from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds observed world poetry day here on Thursday with a pledge to advocate peace, universal brotherhood and love through measured poetic expressions.

Noted poets shared fine poetic pieces from classic bards on their social media accounts to express love for poetry in their respective mother tongues.

“Poetry helps folk to get connected to their cultural and linguist roots. It is a powerful vehicle for human feelings and emotion in a fluent and musical sounds in variety of ways and expressions,” Zara Masood, a young scholar on the meters of poetry said. She added that poetry was a metrical beauty that helped people to recreate their inner self through linguistic diversity.

Literary organisations and rights activists shared popular poetic pieces from world bards as well as local poets, showing love and regard for the contributions of all those literati, who had enlarged view of human thought regarding feel things through poetry.

Poets of Pashto, Hindko, Urdu and Persian in provincial capital posted up sublime poetic pieces from the poetry of the past ages while pieces of modern poets were also shared with great appreciation and love on social media.

The significance of the world poetry day is to raise awareness among people to read both classic and modern poetry to widen scope of their vision and world view.

This year theme of the world poetry day was ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ with a clear objective to get connected with poets of the past whose refined measured thoughts and feelings widened the scope of human vision. World people have known different types of poetry depending on cultural patterns since its first creation.

Noted poets believed poetry remained the most effective tool of expression for human thoughts down the ages. No language on earth could live without poetry as rhymed words and phrases cast a magical impact on the readers and the audience. It is believed that the epic of Gilgamesh had appeared around 4,000 years ago in Babylon and since then poetry in all world languages had evolved in structure and form.

Prof Abaseen Yousafzai told this scribe that among all forms of poetry, folk rhymes were found to be the most effective vehicle for human expression. He said that most ancient tribes used to communicate through poetic jargon.

Khalid Khalil, a local bilingual poet, said that poetry had a strange music that never failed to impress audience as it had tastes suited every individual and should be adopted to meet our purposeful target through the strength of poetry.

He said that scholars in the past used poetry to invite the attention of people to understand their message. “It proved a magical weapon till this day,” he said.

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2024