Maybe you are one of the many people like me who have forgotten that the World Poetry Day just passed. For the uninformed, the World Poetry Day was last March 21, 2006. 

Ours is a verbose world yet it is ironic that we have not given accolades to poetry as much as we value gossip and tall tales. In the UNESCO website, I have found only two sites catalogued under Philippines. Sadly, one is just a directory of ads (it seemed that it was unscreened) and another (thank God), the work of a poet who has dedicated himself to the craft. This is worth reading. 

Poetry to me is like the very breath of life. I have written a lot of poems over the last two decades but they have not seen the public light. Reluctantly, because I have employed my conjectures of rhythm and rhyme primarily for my personal ends. I have not chronicled them except for two notebooks- full of my idiosyncrasies. Besides, my style if any is unstructured (like my life?) so I can never be an authority in this. 

My problem in writing poetry is that my “muse’ comes but in a blue moon. Rare. Like La Niňa in the desert. Oh to capture that fleeting moment is priceless! To me, its immortality is embodied in the person or the object to which it was written for. Like a flicker of light, the poem is consumed by the reader and transformed to an unwavering flame until it meets its purpose. But it will not die. It will always be there waiting for another breath of life, in another form or in another poet.

World Poetry Day is on March 21, and was declared by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1999. The purpose of the day is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world and, as the UNESCO session declaring the day says, to "give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements.