What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
This is the dark time, my love,
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
from the book UNIVERSITY OF HUNGER/ Bloodaxe Books
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The cover of Martin Carter's University of Hunger
What Sparks Poetry:
Vahni Capildeo on Martin Carter’s “This Is the Dark Time My Love”

“When did you—when does anyone—start writing poetry; or, when would you call the things, the scribbles, the utterances that you make or break, 'poetry?' When they are very young, a lot of people make up rhymes, or become attached to reciting mundane or magical-seeming phrases. Children may take pleasure in exclamations, swear words, and other fragments collaged from the grown-up world of overheard speech. If those contain the early sparks of poetry, for many Caribbean readers Martin Carter is a contributor to the flame."
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"John Barr, 76, a former investment banker who long headed the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, has waited years to realize his dream Connecticut workplace....'I look forward to it showing up in my art,' he said. 'You never know when a line is going to float into your head.'

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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