Chief Editor: Retang Wohangara
Life hardship more than often catches us by surprise, then the option: we go down crumbling or keep shining. You crumble if it sinks you down and turns you into a bundle of negative feelings. You crumble if you fail to see any glimmer of hope and believe that it is the end of your world. At another end of the spectrum, you keep shining when you do not give it an inch to scare you most of the time. You survive if you manage to stand your ground during difficult situations.
This Covid-19 pandemic has left scars in humanity, brought extensive damages from family to global levels. It delivers serious blows to all corners of life, slaps us with fear, fear of future, of losing your own life and your loved ones’. It gives us gloomy, boring days for being imprisoned in “little ghetto.” Yet some refuse to throw up their hands. Covid-19 may lock them down physically, but nor their mind and senses. Covid-19 hands them lemon, and then they make lemonade.
Crafted by students, alumni, and lecturers of the Faculty of Language and Arts (FLA) – Unika Soegijapranata, the 55 poems in this anthology reflect the heart-beatings of this particular time. They attempt to bear voices of human deep feelings. The pandemic has challenged someone’s will to survive, and that when he was passing the door, “I [he] failed to recognize my [his) desire” to breathe life; it turns someone to be “a pondering lonely ghost.”
And yet, despite the gloom exhaled by this “monster, momok, sinful creature, the watching dog in one’s door,” optimism still gains its feet: that the days of worry will surely pass as long as “we work together, and help in kindness.” This pandemic teaches us to be more grateful even for the smile we make “behind my [our] black mask,” and to nurture love as the cure to “any kind of illness.”
Let these poems become ways of maintaining and remembering today’s stories. During this time of digital regime, when things get louder and noisier, may the poems serve the human needs for silence and self-reflection.
Human beings are embedded with various kinds of strong feeling, of passions that are often brought to life into words. In his poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, the American poet, Walt Whitman writes, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion…” Thus, I believe that the students, alumni, and the lecturers of FLA who share their poems with us in this FLApoetry Anthology want to articulate their existence as parts of humankind.
Spirat Caritatem, Bendan Duwur, Semarang, 17 October 2020
