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Paying the Highest Price
Water Your Flowers With Love is a collection of poems covering topics from grief and exile to tenderness and moral urgency, all centered around the notion that faith in love is crucial. What inspired this particular collection of poetry?
In today’s chaotic and at times dark world, we are all in need of a hopeful message. The collection has been inspired by and derived from my personal life experiences and today’s events and trends that shape our world. I wrote Water Your Flowers With Love hoping to raise awareness of today’s issues that still affect so many people, and children, and to portray that through love and compassion we can do better. The idea is that within all the darkness and chaos in the world, there is still light within each one of us, and together we can create a better world. The collection aims to invite readers to look beyond themselves into our world and also at what we all share as humans. It portrays the power of love and compassion and spreads a message of hope.
The collection often returns to children affected by war and displacement. What draws you to that perspective?
Children are the flowers of the world. They shape our future; they are our gold. We owe it to them, for the future, for humanity, to make sure they have the right to live, laugh, play, and grow old. And yet, children are still paying the highest price. Having experienced war myself as a child and living through its debilitating effects my entire life, I want to depict the effects it has on everyone, and especially on children.
Are there poems in this collection that changed significantly from their first draft to their final form?
No, not really. None of them has changed significantly.
Looking back on Water Your Flowers With Love, what did writing this collection teach you about compassion—both for others and for yourself?
Writing Water Your Flowers With Love reinforced my belief in humanity and showed time and again that compassion, along with love, exists within each one of us. They are both ingrained in our psyche; they are both part of the light that exists within us all. At times, we might need to look deep within, past the walls we have built, but the light is there, waiting to be manifested.
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From the chambers of pain
That were supposed to hold
Only love on their walls.
They were left alone…
To fight on their own.
Maybe they “cared,”
But they were too scared?
-Koula Hadjitooulou
In a narrative between past and present, Koula Hadjitooulou paints a current picture of the ugliness and beauty of today’s world. She portrays the power of love and compassion and spreads the message of hope. Koula ponders the human spirit, the strength of our inner selves, and the light within each one of us.
Water Your Flowers With Love: A Collection of Poems
Water Your Flowers With Love is a poetry collection that moves through grief, memory, exile, tenderness, and moral urgency without ever letting go of its faith in love as a sustaining force. Across poems about childhood, a lost father, immigration, war, kindness, and the consolations of the natural world, Author Koula Hadjitooulou keeps returning to one central conviction: the human spirit is fragile, but it isn’t finished. The book’s title poem crystallizes that vision by turning childhood harm into an aching plea for gentleness, while poems like “Cyprus and the Girl with the Water Jug,” “Warrior of Life,” and “Three Little Birds” widen the emotional field into displacement, survival, and the cost of violence borne by children.
What stayed with me most was the book’s emotional sincerity. This is not guarded poetry. Hadjitooulou writes as someone who means every line, and that directness gives the collection its pulse. The poems about her father especially landed hard for me. In “I Can Still Feel His Warmth” and “Letter to My Dad,” the grief isn’t abstract or ornamental. It feels authentic, almost tactile, as though memory itself were giving off heat. I also found myself moved by the recurring image-world of flowers, stars, hills, wind, and birds. In another writer’s hands, that language might feel overly sweet, but here it often works because it comes from a genuine instinct toward repair. Even when the book turns toward atrocity and abandonment, it keeps searching for what she calls “pockets of light,” and I admired that refusal to surrender to bitterness.
What I appreciated about the collection is also where I felt its limits. The writing is strongest when Hadjitooulou anchors her hopeful, exhortatory style in a specific story or image, as she does with the child carrying a water jug in a refugee camp, the young girl forced into marriage in “She Was Only Fifteen,” or the immigrant soul suspended between two worlds. In those pieces, the poems gather weight and texture. Elsewhere, the book leans on affirmation, repetition, and uplift. The ideas are earnest and relatable, sometimes beautifully so. What I felt was a writer trying, again and again, to make compassion usable. And in a collection so preoccupied with survival, resilience, and the moral necessity of tenderness, the insistence itself becomes part of the art.
Water Your Flowers With Love gave me the feeling that I had spent time with a voice shaped by hurt, gratitude, and an almost stubborn belief in mercy. I’d recommend it to readers who like accessible, heartfelt poetry, especially those drawn to poems about healing, family, displacement, inner strength, and the attempt to keep faith even when the world makes that difficult.
Pages: 160 | ASIN : B0G4F2K2TC
