It was November ~ the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines.
– L.M. Montgomery
It was November ~ the month of promiscuous trees, turbulent moons dressed up in haze, opal leaves layering the smock of earth.
© Iulia Halatz
Art by Charles Vess.
“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn’t raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
Laurie Lee – Cider With Rosie
Eliot Hodgkin – Undergrowth
“The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.”
– Machado de Assis, Those Cousins from Sapucaia, 1883
Henri Rousseau
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
– Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way
Valera Lutfullina
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
– St. Augustine
Maximilian Lenz – A World (1899)
“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
– Hermann Hesse
Art – Consuelo González Amezcua
Song of Spring
by Iulia Halatz
Written for the Anthology Volume I: Writings from the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective
Spring is a princess
without voice
only fingers
to mix colors
in the rainbows.
She’s got a vessel
for the softest fragrance
pressed in archives
in the Library of Scent…
There are plums
the cherries
and the blooms of vines
escalating
on the earth’s shelves…
Anyone who writes down
to Spring
is simply wasting
a leaf of scent.
No one is ever so poor
as not to write up
music
to all the shades of Spring
and to the dancing stars
to give a gift
of chaos…
© Iulia Halatz
Art – Edwin Howland Blashfield – Spring scattering stars
“If your expectation is a slim volume of precise poems according to a clever little theme, you’ll be deeply disappointed by SD’s offering. Poetry at SD isn’t nice and tidy, it isn’t precise or easily categorized, nor does it intend to leave you peaceful. As Iulia Halatz says in her poem What Can I Give You? “Not by blindness / we can reorder colors / but by the painting of a soul.” There is absolutely nothing here that is calm or apologetic, nor will any writer be careful with your sensibilities and spare you the brunt of their truth.” – excerpt from Candice Louisa Daquin’s review of the Anthology
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen…”
Ernest Hemingway – A Moveable Feast
Andrea Kowch
The story starts with “the pen is mightier than the sword” and we totally give in to it. Our words are the polisher of rough patches, the clearer of dark skies, the bridges for Human-to-Human interaction.
The prerequisite of a powerful business appeal is no longer connected to either B2C (business-to-customer) or B2B (business-to-business) but to H2H, Human-to-Human. We are all story tellers and we need to gather (and charm) audiences everywhere. We cannot live outside a story, for it can be our own life story, or the story we have created. Even if you sell ski gear, the props of a story represent the frame on which you start building and selling.
What if your story fails? And your words are dying slowly and rot in places unknown. What if our stories contradict others and fall to pieces? There will be always moments when our words are not enough, when we are not enough due to the limitations of some obsolete measurements in quality. Or success. Or the money measurement for success. Would we turn into knights (from gardeners)?
“Author Cassidy Dale points out that many people are either knights or gardeners. The knights view the world as a cataclysmic conflict with winners and losers, with battles to be fought, and with right and wrong as the dominant drivers. Gardeners, on the other hand, have the instinct to look for ways to heal, to connect, and to grow the people they encounter.”
– Seth Godin
I admit I sometimes fight… with my hat. I put it on and leave. They are not wrong and I am right, just my pen is incomplete. So, (I hope) I am still a gardener.
How would you fight? With the crafted spears of a magnificent simple idea?
Find another pen and Demonstrate. Find new words that breathe and start with the truest sentence that you know and put on a show. Simplify! For every simple idea, use demonstrations, figures, results, skills acquired. Demonstrate your mission and show your vision and their power. Show that you can move a mountain or fly over it.
– Iulia Halatz
Michael Cheval
“These woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”
– Robert Frost
Art by Erin Kelso.
