Poetry in the Park,  A Garden of Words in Celebration of Shikor’s Silver Jubilee

Poetry in the Park,  A Garden of Words in Celebration of Shikor’s Silver Jubilee, where verses took root under open skies, and language bloomed beneath the trees

On a golden evening when light danced softly through the leaves and the wind carried ancient rhythms, Victoria Park ceased to be an ordinary place. It became poetry itself. Birds whispered between branches, sunlight draped the grass like silk, and voices rose in harmony as Shikor, one of the UK’s leading Bengali literary forums, marked its 25th anniversary with a soulful event– Poetry in the Park.

This was no ordinary gathering, but a living celebration of verse, memory, and belonging. The park, with its open skies and green embrace, cradled poets and dreamers who arrived from across the UK, bearing poems like offerings. It was a space where language met landscape, where the diaspora’s longing found shape in rhythm and sound.

The evening opened with a tender tribute from Faruk Ahmed Roni, poet and editor, who honoured the late Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury, Shikor’s chief advisor and a towering figure in Bengali literature. In his remembrance, history stood still, and the heartbeat of generations echoed across the grass.

What followed was a luminous flow of voices: Mojibul Haque Moni, Kaberi Mukherjee, Bodrul Chowdhury, Moynur Rahman Babul, Shamim Ahmad, A.K.M. Abdullah, Neela Niki Khan, Foyzur Rahman Foyez, Smriti Azad, Hafsa Islam, Hasan Mahmud, and many more, each with a voice like a thread, weaving together a tapestry of emotion and truth.

There was no stage, no spotlight, no script: just poets, listeners, and the open air. The grass was the ground of communion, the breeze a silent witness. The verses floated freely, grief, joy, exile, love, all carried without borders. Though far from their ancestral soil, these poets bore their language as one bears a pulse. Every word spoken in Bengali became both a whisper to the past and a promise to the future.

Among the poems, laughter, and quiet tears, Shikor’s vision shone through of a cultural home that transcends geography. Its initiative, Global Poet & Poetry, seeks to link voices across continents, creating a constellation of poets who write in many tongues but speak from the same soul.

As dusk deepened, talk turned to the forthcoming Silver Jubilee celebrations planned in London, Dhaka, and Kolkata, a tri-city embrace of Shikor’s literary journey. In the fading light, ideas bloomed like night flowers: how to nurture young voices, how to preserve language in a fast world, how to keep poetry alive in exile.

The beauty of the evening lay not only in the words spoken, but in the silence between them, the sacred hush after a verse, the breath of the wind after applause. In that moment, Victoria Park was no longer a place. It was a feeling. It was home.

Poetry in the Park will live on, not just in memory, but in every word that followed, every poem yet unwritten, every gathering where language becomes sanctuary.

Here, among trees and strangers turned kin, Shikor lit a fire that will burn gently across borders, a beacon of voice, heritage, and the enduring magic of poetry.