I have been writing poetry since I was a child. I had an entire notebook filled with poems. Somewhere along the way I grew up, the notebook disappeared, got lost with all the moves... and immigration... and then my hobby writing poems moved into my computer instead. For the last twenty years, here in the United States, I have continued writing. Not every week or every month, but whenever something inside me asked to become words.

At some point I became curious about something new. As a linguist, I wanted to know whether I could write poetry directly in English. Then I started translating some of my Russian poems, trying to preserve not only their meaning but also their rhythm and rhyme. Something interesting happened during that process. They stopped being simple translations. The language itself began changing the thoughts, and many of those poems became new poems altogether.

A while ago I started creating meditation music together with one of my sacred sisters from our Sacred Dance community. One day, during a conversation, she asked whether I would be willing to share some of my poetry with her. That was not an easy question. Poetry is one of the most personal things I write. Very few people have ever read my poems. Besides... who really reads other people's poetry these days? Even books struggle to find readers. Poems often stay hidden in folders, notebooks, or hard drives, quietly waiting for someone who may never come.

So I shared them... She began writing music for several of the poems. Before long, we had created two complete albums together. Yes, the music was created with AI. I know that sentence alone is enough for some people to stop reading. But when I listen to these songs, I do not hear artificial intelligence. I hear an opportunity! A possibility! I hear my own words finally finding another form of life. Without this technology, these poems would most likely have remained private until the end of my life. I do not have a band, an orchestra, a choir, a recording studio, or the budget to hire musicians and producers. Those dreams would probably have stayed dreams.

Instead, there are now songs.... People can listen to them. They can sing them if they wish. They can make them part of their own stories, or simply let them pass by. That choice belongs to them. My part was simply allowing the poems to leave the drawer where they had been quietly waiting for decades. 

There is one more little story that still makes me smile. One of the albums is called Ordinary Miracels. Yes... Miracels. I noticed the typo only after everything had already been published. I could probably fix it, but somehow I don't want to. I am dyslexic, after all. That tiny mistake has become part of the story. It reminds me that beautiful things do not have to arrive perfectly polished. Sometimes even a misspelled miracle is still a miracle.

The poems in that album are often bittersweet, yet the music carries hope. Perhaps that accidental title says exactly what it was always meant to say.

If you are curious, here are the two albums.  I actually have 26 monthly listeners! :-) 

Kitchen Wisdom

Ordinary Miracels