Bahraini poet to showcase talent

Talented young poet, Amal Almarzooq is travelling to the UAE this week to attend the first ever Dubai International Poetry Festival which is expected to attract 100 poets from 45 countries.

Amal is one of four Bahraini poets who will read their poems at the event organised by Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation.

Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka, Winner of 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, will address the opening session of the festival themed 'A Thousand Poets - One Language'.

And even though poems will be recited in different languages, there will be translations in Arabic and English so that the spirit of the poems is communicated to all delegates and the public attending the festival.

"It is very encouraging for me to attend an event of this calibre. I am taking this as a challenge and an opportunity to show that Bahraini youth can achieve anything," said the 22-year-oldfrom A'ali.

Amal is a fourth year student at Kingdom University and is studying mass communications and public relations. She is a budding journalist and works for an Arabic newspaper.

Amal started writing poetry four years ago and under the tutelage of Mubarik Al Ammari, president of the Poetry Society in Bahrain, she has published her poetry in several local Arabic newspapers.

She writes in her mother-tongue about social issues and emotions. "I prefer to write about women's emotions and most of the emotions I write about are feelings that I have experienced," she said.

"I am going to the festival with a dual purpose: to participate and to cover the event as a journalist."

Amal has, in the past, interviewed poets in Bahrain and the GCC for two television shows that were aired on Bahrain TV and Kuwaiti channel, Al Bawadi.

Excerpt from Amal's poem,

The Magnificent Poem

Oh, you, who is the end of a magnificent poem ever composed

By a throbbing (Hope)

Oh, ye, my limits

Oh, ye, my shackles

Oh, ye, love with the colour of

It is neither enlightened modern

Nor traditionally boring.

Look at my lute

Oh, ye, my existence,

Its string is intoxicated

It tried to play you for me

It tried many a time ... but failed

Do you know, dearest, that in your absence

Time grows old

Oh, ye, my thunders

Shake this world with your pulse

Shake my lute

Let me lean towards you

And throw myself on you, Honey.