Poets Night “Global Love” In Conjunction with: SLAM
Global Love – A Poets View
On May 1, declared Global Love Day by the Global Love Foundation, COMMON and SLaM sponsored a poetry evening at Lentil as Anything in Collingwood. The theme of the poetry was to address the issue of global love from whatever perspective the contributing poets decided.
Expressing the intensely emotional and spiritually abstract concept of global love lends itself to being described from within the perspective of the world possessed by poets. Swami Chinmayananda once said that a yogi must have the mind and heart of a poet in order to appreciate the suggestive quality of the sacred mantras of scripture.
The poetry read during the evening at Lentil proved this point. There was a spirit which pervaded the performances which was sufficiently infectious to motivate one of the cooks and two of the waiters to spontaneously take to the microphone to recite poetry.
The evening was woven together with song as Christie Heart contributed her brand of balladering. Songs which captured the concept of love from various musical genres.
The recognition that the sensitive spiritual perspective of a poet is available to all people at heart level is a primary motivator in this engagement of poetry. Through presenting expressed poets it is hoped that the un-expressed poetic nature of others will be stimulated. The collective awareness of the great love which we share in common will then become more apparent to all.
In pursuit of this objective it is intended to hold more poetry readings.
Hyper Haikus, Rapper’s Delight and a Down-Under Duet at the Lentil.
A fine selection of Melbourne’s budding and bloomin’ poet population congregated at Lentil as Anything in Abbotsford Convent, in order to spread a liberal helping of love and peace over the globe. Norman slammed all hatred with his exquisite rhymes whilst our resident sage Charles enlightened us with his technologically advanced mobile-phone verse. Christine created a friendly vibe with her beautiful music which helped everybody open up, talk and get to know each other.
Hot topics, in typical Lentil style, included “are fish organic?”, “are sultanas simply flies with no legs and wings?” and also “What are we going to eat?”
The evening proved to be a success with a chef, a waiter and some other random people adding to the pool of prose.
We had all, from haiku’s and rap to a very hard to hear, yet simply enduring duet; by the end however, words did not matter – love was in the air to the extent that even Eros would be proud of us. A great way to highlight Global Love Day was achieved in style, amongst good friendly brethren (and sister-en) all whilst eating good food; a welcome bonus!
I also take great pride in the fact that I had the privilege to contribute to the evening’s activities; I shared a freshly written poem with all those on board. I really felt that I was amongst people, who I could reach out to, and who would inturn receive me with open arms. It felt reassuring that in today’s day and age, I could find the opportunity to celebrate and support global love with a group of such great people.
My one wish is that in the future, more people attend an event like this; it proved itself to be a great way to get to know each other and share thoughts and ideas, with stylo mucho.
– Jagdeep (Jag) Singh Shergil