Poets never raise barriers to separate people or nations. They have always felt the world as one whole. Their thought is a quest for all the common ties that make up the chain of eternity and can bring a happy life to humanity. They can see the world in no other way. Hence their revolt against any kind of division. Poets have always stood for the great brotherhood of people. Any separation from that brotherhood is for them an alienation of the personality from its immanent nature.

Shakespeare said that human potential knows no limits. What all the poets before and after him have expressed confirms this thought.

In the great brotherhood of people, the poet is the one who discloses in a beautiful manner each people's characteristic traits. For the world is neither simple, nor uniform. Poets comprehend it as a big community made up precisely of the differences of individualities. And they rise against any dark forces of evil that turn against these individualities. They stand for the freedom of personality, for the freedom of nations, seeing the meaning of life solely in this light.

The long tradition of poetry among the Macedonian people testifies to the brotherhood of peoples and their primordial striving for freedom. Macedonia has made great sacrifices in the defence of this noble idea, never giving in to the attempts made over centuries to subdue the voice of the Macedonian poets, to deny the individuality of the Macedonian people and their struggle in the defence of human freedom.

The poets from all over the world, who for years have gathered on the shores of Lake Ohrid and on the banks of the River Drim, have best grasped this. It has been the poets who have best understood the Macedonian people, their history, sufferings, and the freedom they had longed for. With its turbulent history and its just fight for freedom, Macedonia lives in the hearts of many a poet all over the world. Macedonia has never been a mere momentary inspiration for modern poetry; it has rather inspired a lasting devotion to a country and a people which has been a symbol of mutual understanding and co-operation. In a word, a symbol of free humanity.

The poets of the world have come to Macedonia and Macedonia has accepted them as its own. They come to Macedonia as one comes to one's own country, to one's own birthplace. That is how the poets of the world and of Macedonia have agreed it should be. The ever-present wish of the world's poets to come together has been whole-heartedly accepted and ennobled by Macedonia. Macedonia is now the country of poets. As it has always been. As the poets from all over the world experience it.

In contrast to the senseless divisions of the world, Macedonia brings the poets from different continents together. In return, they ceaselessly show their love for this country, for with it and through it they can feel themselves and undivided. This link has its deep roots in the past, but today it is finding its full expression.

This is a truth we accept with pleasure. This is one of the strongest achievements of people today, living between anxiety and hope for the future. This is an achievement which can give us confidence that we possess the strength to live in peace and in an atmosphere of mutual understanding. It feeds us with new lymph stimulating our creative power to reflect our time and fulfil our duties towards it.

Mark O'Conor – Australia

On the Statue of Saints Cyril and Methodius
(Inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet)

Twined in a block of jade, two Siamese saints
whose separateness is in the grave, they live
in what they made: an unshaken code that links
all Slavic sounds with black marks on a page;
and take, with the slim goat-beards of a Chinese sage,
the frozen gesture of all great reformers
whose levers drop the world into some other groove.
Yet they are lucky to be known.
We lack a monument, a name, a myth
for the great subversive who first showed
how ten thousand holy signs could be spelled down
to three dozen sounds. He set a curse
to put the peasant with the priest, and lash
the Sphinx's face with sand. 'Profane!
When all that speak may read.'
The stiff old kings held rank a while
against this alphabetic order. We hear
of later frays: how Minos lost and Cadmus
found the art; of the Nile priest who cried
'You Greeks are children, history-less, who lose
your letters with each change of time'. Yet we forget
who stripped the signs of Rome's
two dozen sword-like sounds; or built them up
for richer tongues, inventing V and W,
co-opting K and Y.
Those thirty soldiers, Cyril, Meto,
that you sent out nine centuries ago,
how many brawls they started, sides
they fought on! Launching
an alphabet is a bird uncaged;
it brings you back no thanks.
your progeny, your leaden men
will fight again in causes
we'd suppress, are loyal only
each to his own sound.
Your inky soldiers waken hope
for French, the half-reformed, for
English, Irish, Dansk, the three
miswritten tongues. How
did you dare something so perfect
in this home country of the curse of Babel?
So great a start needs a religious thrust
which it outgrows. Yet now in all Slavonic lands
there's scarce a sound misplaced. Five centuries
in Yugoslavia of Turkish ban could not root out
those thirty ancient partisans who store
the father's knowledge for the child.

 
Grace Schulman – USA

The Source

Not like the amber city waters,
gunmetal at dawn, the River Drim,
limpid as pure recall, flows from Lake Ohrid,
itself unbruised, displaying
islands of phragmites
and curly punkweed growing from the floor
like memories surfacing. Tracing the river
to its source, as though I'd find
sulphurous thoughts at mind's end like the stars
at the bottom of Dante's hell, like draggled ghosts
grown into ringing brightness, I sailed
to a granite island, and saw
near an abandoned monastery,
where peacocks flourish in walnut trees,
a spring swell into Lake Ohrid, which,
damned to break its flow, surges
into the village of Struga, between banks
of poplars with pointillist leaves,
hauling boys who dive for coins. The source?
One evening, quicksilver at moonrise,
the river carried voices
in Urdu, Swahili, Flemish, all mirrored
in Macedonian, the language
of that country, for a limestone bridge
held poets who sang against the river's current
to listeners on the banks. The source was song.

Anne Fairbairn – USA

The Source
(The psychic depths are nature
and nature is creative life - C. J. Jung)

Each night Lake Ohrid sings with light;
this ancient heart of earth
draws to its own dark silence
the poetry of the stars.
Renewed at this deep and luminous source,
Struga poets rejoice;
we sing with water stars
on these soft primordial nights.
At dawn from mists across the lake,
mirrored beauty glides,
the summer swans of Ohrid
bestow on us their grace.