Poetry is a form of art used to express poet’s feelings and thoughts about life issues. Poems are usually in the form of connoted sentences that are spoken or written in rhymes of different emotional intensities.

Twenty-three year old Paradis Winslet, is one Rwandan poet that possesses this special talent. She finds poetry the simplest form of letting out what she feels inside.

"Sometimes I feel like I need to really talk to myself, yet I can’t, so I just start writing,” Winslet said.  

She has always been a writer from a young age and her talent was nurtured by continuously writing stories and poems whenever she could.

These she stored in a book and at that time these were so personal and she was not willing to share them. However, along the road, she recalls a time when she had given up writing and almost lost her poetic skills.

"It was mine and so personal but one day someone so curious to see what I wrote, stole my book of poems and stories and never returned it. This completely broke my heart and I lost all my courage to write completely. I decided to never write again.” But she could not hold out for long.

"I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt like something was building within and I couldn’t contain it at all. So I got a pen and paper and started writing again and this time I do not mind sharing what I write with others.”

Winslet eventually started writing seriously in 2000, and it’s now nine years down the road and she’s still going strong.

This she says has not been an easy road because in order to write good poems, a lot of time needs to be invested in it so as to produce something that flows and makes sense when you read it to an audience.

Today, her poems have not gone unnoticed. This year, together with other artists, she was selected by the University of Durban in South Africa to represent Rwanda as a poet at the 2010 World Cup.

This came after she wrote a poem about the 2010 World Cup theme. Next Sunday, we shall run one of her poems.

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