Synkroniciti is proud to welcome Featured Artist Helen Gilbert, with “The River with the Dam,” her first published poem (at the tender age of eighty). This poem is a meditation on life, personal energy and community, using the immense Itaipu dam in South America as a metaphor. How do we keep our energy clean and productive when the weight of the world and our personal situation seems insurmountable? We all struggle with pressure in one way or another and sometimes it feels as if we are minutes from being swept away by the flood of our consciousness or that we have choked off our own life force. Helen doesn’t have the answers, but she raises a cry above the din of modern life to ask if there is a better, more sustainable way of being.
Read Helen’s relatable poem in Synkroniciti’s “Flow” issue, Vol 4, No. 2. Purchase the issue or subscribe here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/.
Helen Gilbert was born in 1941 in Chile of a British Father and an American mother. Her father was a diplomat and she was brought up in three different cultures, Latin American, British and American. Because of the many moves with her father’s job, she now lives very happily in multicultural Britain.
“The River with the Dam” is Helen’s first published poem, inspired by a piece of music by Philip Glass called Itaipu, the name of a dam on the river Paraná in South America. Her father was working in Paraguay while she was at boarding school in Argentina. During the holidays she would fly home in an aeroplane which used the river Paraná for take-off and landing, hence her interest in Itaipu.