Held every year on 21 March, World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity.

World Poetry Day is the occasion to honor poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media.

This is one of my favorite poems by me:

PILFERER OF THORNS

There comes a day
when gaiety
and ruling stars
are not enough…
Yet I plunge into
the satisfaction of
hologram happiness.

I am slave no more
to my self-deprecation
I am slave no more
to the pilgrimage of water
and the tiny gem of a moon
witness to
all my erroneous choices…

My skin is scaly
and cold
I do not fit
this shifting sands world
I believe in landslides…

A half mermaid
and half tree goddess
can lead
a turbulent sun-ridden dominion
to the end
of want and pain.

We are prisoners
to promiscuous light
and innocent dark
enlivened by fair-featured
butterflies caught in
a smock of diffuse glint…
They loved the light
and died.

The core of the day
envisions what
lies above
the acme of temerity:
undiscovered
undeciphered
unfathomable
festering
Glee…
I keep it under
layers of boiling
lava
and grope for it
with bare hands.

With burned fingers
and asbestos hearts
We receive response
from the insouciant night:
the indigo skies glimmered
with stars
and the trees and grasses
slaving
for the summer wind.

© Iulia Halatz

Also published on Medium.com.
https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/pilferer-of-thorns-6965394fec74

Art by Marcela Bolivar.