I am Katherine (Yunqing) Zhao, a student at Beijing 101 High School. Born in the year of the Beijing Olympic Games, I grew up playing within Asia's largest urban park—the Olympic Forest Park——my childhood steeped in the fragrance of flowers and the songs of birds. I observed bird migrations, witnessed butterfly metamorphoses, saw ponds teeming with koi and frogs croaking in chorus. I gazed upon vistas from mountain peaks, napped beneath woodland groves, lunched and played chess at stone tables, recited poetry by lotus ponds, caught fish in streams, picnicked after school, danced upon ice with withered lotus stems, sculpted in snowdrifts and rolled about in snow... Growing amidst nature, we must infuse poetry into our studies and daily lives.
Verses of the unseen : Poetry in Everyday Life
Your heartbeat is the rhythm,
Your breath the verse.
No need to wait for inspiration's lightning—
Those unspoken sighs,
Starlight hidden in the corners of your eyes,
Moments crumpled by life then smoothed again—
All are destiny's gift of verse.
Poetry dwells not in lofty prophecies, but in the faint glow rooted within life's creases.
It may be the flour snow shaken from mother's apron, the digital rain dancing on the cash register at dawn's convenience store,
the winding city veins on delivery slips, the rhythmic rise and fall of rebar in construction workers' hands, the narratives flowing through nurses' handover logs...
Here,
every soul is an unbound volume of verse,
every tale worthy of being preserved line by line.
Unfold the blank pages of your life.
Let the pen tip be the key unlocking the stars,
let the dust of daily life crystallise into diamonds within the stanzas.
Fishing for poetry amidst the world's mundane smoke and fire,
may each ordinary day become a shining verse.
