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.
