In a Very Sunny System. A Year with Poets

Poems have an amazing ability to bring people together. Sometimes you hear a poetic phrase and understand that it is a "greeting from a comrade" with whom you grew up in the same sandbox. This phrase resonates "right in the... heart area".

Poets can tell about themselves, about us, and about how we live, with the best words - and we also start to speak their words and think their rhymes.

Poets bring funny images with them - "mice, chicks, little rascals." They animate objects, make us remember dear places, and marvel at verbal attractions. They bring dragons and unicorns into our lives and lead us "to Neglinnaya from Arbat, tra-la-la-la-la," and we follow them to see that dog which is "just one of us." Or the hedgehog that is "officially a hedgehog," yet "thumps like an elephant."

And we notice things we didn't see before: here "all the houses are looking at us with their windows," and here "a wizard swims under the bridge" - and we understand that we have entered "a very Sunny system" where everything is right.