UNIVERSAL MANIFESTO BY THE POETS OF THE WORLD
Poets of the World. Let us be together in a claim for life. We are the Warriors for Peace and messengers for a new era in Mankind. We are the Poets of Light and Light convoke us to embrace this appeal for life which by no circumstances you may fail to heed. Poets have a definite role in the beginning of a NEW ERA and the death of all the misery which the ancient one proclaim.
These are decisive times for humanity’s survival: it either keeps on along the precipitous path towards extinction or steers its rudder and sense of direction in course with collective efforts to surmount the hardships and insure long term survival.
Poets of the World. Let us be together in a claim for life. We are the Warriors for Peace and messengers for a new era in Mankind. We are the Poets of Light and Light convoke us to embrace this appeal for life which by no circumstances you may fail to heed. Poets have a definite role in the beginning of a NEW ERA and the death of all the misery which the ancient one proclaim.
These are decisive times for humanity’s survival: it either keeps on along the precipitous path towards extinction or steers its rudder and sense of direction in course with collective efforts to surmount the hardships and insure long term survival.
Since the most remote times that one can recall humanity’s existence has had to coexist hand in hand with the environmental midst that insures and keeps insuring that life goes on. Paradoxically, at the same time, humanity’s eagerness to get more and more, to grow and develop, has deteriorated the planet as a whole reaching limits where survival as a species is at risk. If humanity does not change course !Now! future generations will have solid reasons to deeply resent us.
On the other hand, within this same context, given that humanity is always desiring to be able to acquire more, not only the material resources of the planet are used to grow and subsist but also the human resources, in this way being driven to a merciless competition between human beings that constitute the main driving force amongst us. This, to such an extent, that we are killing each other to merely exist or to simply affirm! I am! this or I am that, nevertheless ! I am! or I am more than you are… Just as we deteriorate the planet’s life systems by abusively wasting material and human resources we build mass destruction weapons that threaten to destroy humanity in a brief period of time. The supremacy of political and economic power is always concentrated on the same hands, it is what we recognize today as the rule of Empire [s].
Not everything is negative. The present moral chaos, the ethical chaos, the political chaos resulting in wars and the economic chaos are nothing but a demonstration of History’s labor pangs like those of a woman who gives birth to a new born, similar to when a phase dies, and gives birth to another that rises out of her womb.
1. – Faced to this scenario the penchant for absolute control that could lead us inevitably, as a human society, towards self destruction and barbarity. In light of new times that are foreseen we, the Poets of the World, undertake to protest on the one hand and on the other to build a new dawn that leads us to definitive liberation.
2. The Poets of the World , not all, only the Poets of the World, for not all the poets in the world are willing to say: I am not, WE ARE. Those of us who are willing to let go of the EGO that kills us and are able to look at each other as EQUALS are part of this collective cavalcade throughout the earth and we place art at the service of humanity.
3. To be a poet is not only to write beautiful poetry but to live up to it, this means not only feeling it but practicing it, and to practice it is something we do everyday, for all the time to come and always, while we set our minds to think and the heart to feel.
4. - To be a Poet of the World is yet something more difficult. To be a Poet of the World is to take on this pronouncement in its most essential part, it is to take on the defense of life, of love, of diversity, of freedom and to be able to say I give my life for Life’s sake, even though I love my life. This is why we say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH to stupidity; we’ve had enough of EGOS because they do not contribute either to collective growth or to personal growth and we place poetry’s art at the service of human existence.
5. - To be a Poet of the World is to be a man or woman warrior who rides the plains of human existence as the poet has done since the night of time. Poets go after perfection and evolvement towards life as a just endeavour. He/she bears the baggage at hand and faces up to existing conditions, whatever they may be. It is for these reasons that we will not be passive in face of the daily crimes being committed in the name of freedom. We will raise our voices as a ray of light and make the coward tremble for we will make words into the best weapons that the assassin has known through history’s width and length.
6. - We acknowledge the valuable contribution of the world’s Poets to humanity’s growth throughout the centuries. Of those who stamped their names in the centenary universal history books and in humanity’s collective memory. We also acknowledge the anonymous Poets who traveled the earth fulfilling legendary missions throughout times. We believe their contributions were valuable to their times and even for today, for now we stand on the verge of a new phase for humanity. But furthermore we Poets of the XXI Century do not wish to become entangled in the past to have a better look at the present and towards the future. As Poets of this Century we are called to be creative and call upon our imagination to find those answers and explanations that humanity TODAY thirsts for, in face of the evident blows and setbacks we are confronted with at this time.
7. - We the Poets of the World declare ourselves all to be equals. Those who have attained consecration and those who are less known, those who are famous and those who remain anonymous, those rich and those poor, blacks and whites, those who are half-breed and those who are yellow, provided that we remain at this side of life and clutch the same swords to battle against that which kills life, battling elbow to elbow behind the same barricade to defend JUSTICE [one justice for all] EQUALITY [effective among all earth’s inhabitants] FREEDOM [true freedom, not the artificial one] and the RIGHTS of peoples to exist and live in peace.
8. - The Poets of the World will declare any place where they find themselves as their arena where to fight against evil, be it big palaces or the miserable urban caves, the big lawns where the man of the earth works or at the bottom of a pit where miners throw up their blood. No neighborhood shall remain unvisited to carry the word as if it was rain falling over the earth conveying a graceful spectacle as if it were flowers in humanity’s eyes. The poet will be the light that guides the warriors the same as dunes in the darkness of the night.
9. - The poets of the World declare ourselves to be pacifists, neither cowards nor passive, nor war-minded, but in no way, shape or form, naïve. We are sentimentalists in nature, for the artistic expression is like ink for writing and the blood of our souls. We live trapped and intoxicated by creative enchantment, to the limits of the painful vertigo of creativity. But this creativity will always have a set objective:
TO SEEK TO IMPROVE LIFE, our individual lives, and that of us all collectively. We are pacifists in search of Universal peace, but PEACE does not come about easy, one has to earn it and fight for it. This why we are warriors. And Peace will not come about if there is no JUSTICE. Peace will come about only if justice reigns first, if not it will be like it is today, where the type of rule is akin to that of the PEACE of the CEMETERIES.
10.- To be a Poet of the World one has to be willing to seek improvement always, to grow in diversity and accept diversity just as we accept the complexity of existence. In the battalion of the Poets of the World there will be space always in which to battle, for believers or non believers, for atheists and for religious, for those who are right and those who are mistaken, but always on this side of life; for heterosexuals, bisexuals or homosexuals but lovers of noble love; for modern warriors as well as for ancient warriors but always for those who are militant for the GOOD. The great chain that might unite the world, link by link, is made up of poets who deliver hope and laughter in this struggle that has been taking place since the dawn of times.
11. - Man has the tendency to attribute his blames on third parties , our challenge is that each one of us assume himself/herself into their own essence, under their own sense of direction, without having to have recourse to others to silence defeats and errors. Our hope is to raise ourselves by means of the word, to light up the verb in the hearts of each one of us and to upbring the verse of mountains, those of the discreet night of the soul, and the careful wrapping of nature´s womb. To be a clairvoyant in the morning, so that each one of us may lift his/her soul with love, through words. Poetry belongs to the world and we owe ourselves to her.
Poet of the World
Join this battle in favor of human existence!
Make yourself the necessary link so that life may continue!
Luis Arias Manzo [General Secretary]
Santiago de Chile, December 2005
Translation by María Eugenia Caseiro [Mariú]
[Cónsul de Miami - USA]
