THE POMEGRANATE: LOVE AND PEACE POEMS

Prof. Ada Aharoni, founder-president of IFLAC (The International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace), is a poet, writer, lecturer and sociologist. She writes in English, French, and Hebrew. She has published twenty-nine books to date that have been translated into seventeen languages. She believes that Poetry, intercultural communication, peace literature and a peace media, can substantially help in healing the urgent ailments of our global village, such as war, violence and famine. She studied at London University (England), where she received her M.Phil in English Literature, and at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem), where she received her Ph.D. degree on the works of Nobel Prize Laureate: Saul Bellow. She has been awarded several international Poetry and Literature prizes, and was elected one of the best “Hundred Global Writer Heroines” (Rochester, New York, 1998). Ada has has recently released two discs of her poems set to music, by Robert Nissenson, in which her poems are sung by singer Michal Tal, and are read by Ada: “Love Poems: To Haim – To Life”, and “A Green Week.” Her poem: “If A White Horse From Jerusalem,” has recently been put to music by Prof. Bret Zvacek, and it was sung and played in concert with the CNY Jazz Orchestra with saxophonist David Liebman on April 16, 2011. Her poems in this anthology,“This Cursed War” (pg.) and “Remember Me Every Time the Moon Rises Over the Sphinx”(pg.) originally appeared in her poetry book: You and I Can Change the World, (Lachman, Haifa, 1999, www.amazon.com). Her URL “Ada Aharoni’s Homepage”is www.iflac.com/ada . Her blog is www.iflac.wordpress.com .

“I believe like T.S Eliot', that ‘Poets are the consciousness of our world,’ or rather - should be.

I write to not only express my inner feelings – through my introspective, psychological eye, as for instance in my love poems, but also with my sociological eye that expresses my worry and care for humanity and the world. In a great part of my poetry, I try to follow the Hebrew saying : “TIKKUN OLAM – the repair of our world.” With all the violence and wars we have on our planet today, we badly need the consciousness and the love of the poets to repair our world and soothe and better ailing humankind. What I try to do, and would like to see, is that more poets become "conscious caretakers", and that we would all write beautiful and fascinating poems that move us to the bone, to be better people and more involved in the mending of our ailing blue planet - before it blows up in nuclear flames! If we do so, I truly believe poets will grow powerful wings and gain a central place where to stand and raise humanity.”