Keywords: France-Tunisia, poetry, Tahar Bekri, radical Islamism, terrorism Tahar Bekri sent me these poems last March, on the day when Islamists in his native Tunis staged a massacre in the walls of the National Museum. Although these poems were written on the occasion of another bloody atrocity -the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists and police officers, committed in January 2015 in the center of Paris. There, the poet has been living in exile for many years, continuing to consider himself a son of his Homeland, to which he devoted all his work. The terrorist attack in Paris forced people to take to the streets, gather in the square, cry from the pain caused by injustice. The Paris events are ambiguous, the mockery of religion does not arouse sympathy, and the people who participated in the march to the Place des Nations were not a homogeneous "crowd". Everyone had their own ideas about the reasons for the terrorist attack, but all were united in their desire not to become hostages of Evil, not to doom themselves to the possibility of prolonging the chain of murders. Takhar Bekri, who has written remarkable books of poetry*, translated into dozens of languages , is a mostly lyrical poet, keen on the search for"open horizons". He, looking for the happiness of finding a "soul harbor", longs for the "fragments of the heart" left in the "ocean of wanderings", for the opportunity to swim to the "coast of hope". He longs to see it sprout both on the land he left behind (after being imprisoned because of his opposition to the regime established in Tunisia after Bourguiba), and on the land he found, dreaming of Freedom... Takhar Bekri is now on the side of those who need the "spring" of new revolutions as a flowering of hope for the opportunity to see the fulfillment of the slogan "Freedom, Equality and Fraternity" in life, to find humanity.- * For the work of Takhar Bekri, see: Prozhogina S. V. Poeziya Takhar Bekri. Frantsuzsko-russkaya antologiya, Moscow, 2002; and al ... Read more