Category Archives: Wordsmith

World Poetry Day!

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 honour 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.

In celebration of this day, I include one of my fondest poems, published in the Sudden Denouement Anthology Volume I.

What can I give you?

What can I give you? I am the blue
as imagined by a blind
and the roots of knowledge
as watered by a scholar.

I am the yellow
wind and the mauve
respond of light
perched
in the ubiquitous trees
tethered in the clouds
that barely scratch
the sky.

I am the green
storm and colorless waves
that wished upon a mountain
to break water in tryst
with the sun.

Not by blindness
we can reorder colors
but by the painting of a soul
in a moment tender
as the liquid moon
is quivering above the forest.

© Iulia Halatz

Art by Jan Schmuckal. Source – Facebook

“To the Parcae”

A single summer grant me, great powers, and
a single autumn for fully ripened song

that, sated with the sweetness of my
playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
right cannot repose in the nether world.
But once what I am bent on, what is
holy, my poetry, is accomplished:
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world!
I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not
accompany me down there. Once I
lived like the gods, and more is not needed.”
Friedrich Hölderlin

Parcae – In ancient Roman religion and myth, the Parcae (singular, Parca) were the female personifications of destiny who directed the lives (and deaths) of humans and gods. They are often called the Fates in English, and their Greek equivalent were the Moirai.

Art – René Magritte – Infinite Recognition (1961)

Sakura in Moonlight

Every time I look at such paintings and imagine such nights, Somerset’s words come to mind:

“It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.”
W. Somerset Maugham– 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965.

Noriko Okawara, Sakura in Moonlight

Fearlessness

“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Art – Olga Kvasha, born in 1976 in Lutsk, Ukraine.
She lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine, in the field of oil painting, book illustration.

Love nebula

“Tenderness is the currency of love”

I believe that above everything there hovers a Nebula of love.
And randomly, one builds a stairway to the nebula and starts throwing buckets of love to you.

Because it is sweet and warm, you confuse it with wild rain drops in midsummer or huge snowflakes or just candy floss.

Whenever I feel the beautiful rain and the snowflakes thawing fire on my cheek, I’ll know you’re there in the nebula, dumping buckets full of love in my head…

Featured on Medium/ the Blue Insights publication.
https://medium.com/blueinsight/love-nebula-2c4097008761

Art – Haruyo Morita, Love Letter. Source: Facebook

The wisdom of life

“The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

Art – Paul Gauguin, Coastal Landscape from Martinique

Letter to my future self

I have discovered the most amazing website, https://www.futureme.org/, on which you can write a letter to the future…

I will and soon, the moment I grasp few free moments for musings and drawing ideas in my mind.

I illustrate with a past photo from 2012. If I were to write a letter to the future, how many things would be true? I can vouch for the fact that in 2012, I would never have imagined a future for me in politics… However, it’s important to remember that nothing is impossible.

The photo was taken on one of the most amazing beaches in Palaiokastritsa, Corfu, in October 2012.