Love conquers all…

Love conquers all is a line from Leopoldo Paradela’s poem Amor Vincit Omnia.  

Here’s the poem:

Let me look at you and

make sense of my theology.

No matter what I do,

I can never empty my heart.

Good for me is good for all.

Silence! My heart speaks;

Love conquers all.

It was the theme of an evening of poems and music organised by the enterprising Jasmine D’Costa’s Trade Architects. 

Jasmine is by now a master at infusing an evening of poetry reading with a touch of chutzpah and turning it into something that stays in your mind for long. 

Love conquers all brought together poets from diverse background – Jasmine from India, Leo Pardela from Brazil, Colin Carberry from Ireland (and now in Mexico) and Goran Simic from Bosnia.

Violinists Mary Elizabeth Brown and Laura D’Angelo complemented the poets and gave a new dimension to the evening by playing pieces from Mozart and some folk interpretations of Bartok, one of 20th century’s foremost ethnomusicologists.

The venue of this splendid evening was the spectacular St.John’s Cathedral of the Polish National Catholic Church on Cowan Avenue

The poetry was brilliant, as was the music.

The poem that touched my heart was Goran Simic’s My Accent.

My Accent

(for Visnja)

I love my accent, I love that wild sea

which attacks my weak tongue.

It doesn't reside in the morning radio news

as much as in the rustle of the job offer flyers

stapled to the street poles.

In my accent you can find my past,

the different me who still talks with imagined fishes

in a glass of water…

My grandfather was a fisherman

and I grew up on a dock

waiting for him to come back.

He built a gigantic aquarium when I was born

and every time he brought a fish

he named it immediately by some word I had to learn

until the next came...next came...next came.

I remember the first two were called "I am"

and after that the beauty of language came to me

through the shining scales.

I learned watching the aquarium

and recognizing the words by the silent colors.

After returning home

my grandfather would spend whole nights

making sentences by combining the fishes

who would pass each other.

It's how I learned to speak.

I left the house the day when my grandfather went

fishing for a black fish he was missing

and never came back.

Now I am sitting in the middle of my empty room

as in an aquarium

and talking with ghosts of the fishes

I used to recognize by words,

talking with the shadows floating

over the flyers ripped off street poles.

"I love my accent....

I love my accent.."

I repeat and repeat again

just not to ask myself :

Who am I now.

Am I real or just the black fish

my grandfather failed to catch.