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.
Photo: Courtesy of Hsun Hsun’s family
“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.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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