The Ministry of Culture, media outlets and more than 100 poets and writers have launched a poetry drive to honor the victims of the Greater Kaohsiung gas pipeline explosions and their families in the hope of providing the survivors with comfort.
Poems about the Kaohsiung blasts have been posted on the Facebook page of the ministry’s Qidong Poetry Salon since Monday.
The salon site was launched on Thursday last week to help promote and preserve Taiwanese poetry.
“Suffering makes us appreciate each other more. Let us use poetry to pray for our fellow citizens who are in tears,” a statement on the salon’s page reads.
So far, more than 25 poems about the disaster have been posted, including ones written by poets Kuan Kuan (管管) and Chiang Hsun (蔣勳).
Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台), herself a renowned essayist and cultural critic, has contributed a poem titled Ruguo Zao Zhidao (如果早知道 , “If I Had Known Earlier”).
“If I had known earlier that the sight of you going out in a hurry tonight means that you would linger out of my reach this life, dear, oh how I would fall to my knees and kiss every inch of the soil you’ve stepped over,” the poem reads.
The explosions on Thursday night last week killed 30 people and injured 310.
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