Pirating love
is hunting the fields
in early May dreams
for fireflies and roses alike
to keep them barred
in jars and bottles with light
until your heart
inflames to the touch
and burns
from drinking shades of the evening
and hues of the stars
only to spark
in the dark
as source of delight
in torn summer nights…
Art by Andrea Kowch.
You are better than unicorns
and moonshine combined.
You are better than gossamer
and fireflies entwined.
Make sure to notice
the collateral beauty
of dreaming and dreading,
wishing and fearing,
abysses and mountains,
venom and honey
in a kiss
that numbs
and talks to my heart
about the color of a feeling.
Art by Helen Flockhart.
Iulia Halatz
She says: “Be the one who cares, make words so disruptive that they create new worlds, hopes and dreams. Even if we are unhappy dinosaurs and find shelter in an Iron Tale or ruminate about feeling too much, whilst declaring colorless apparel, we should take power and strength from our stories.”
Her published poems can be found in The Sudden Denouement Anthology Volume I.
What is your why?
We all have a secret engine. It may be the fire in our hearts lit by a wondrous smile, or the sparkle of a new day, the uneasy warmth of doing something new, the hope of achieving something we only dreamed about, or just finishing a project, a new venture.
Why do you get up in the morning? To start all over, to rewind, to redo and to make it better. Time is what we really own. Time is what we really have to define Better. Time shapeshifts in what we make of it and in the colors of our feelings.
A Romanian folk tale tells the story of a brave king, one eye smiling and the other crying. We keep on doing the daily grind, one eye crying, and one eye laughing at the Why in our hearts. Our Why is the craving for doing something we and others will love.
Success is not something handed to us. But we can hand ourselves a bit of happiness at forgetting our daily pet peeves and shaping the time in something lovable. Love but attracts other types of love.
“I want no vacation – no surcease from my labors. If people would select a life work compatible with their temperaments, the sum total of happiness would be immeasurably increased in the world.” – Nikola Tesla
Spring is the season of goodwill. I contribute to the sum total of happiness with my (other) work of being the follower of seasons and the keeper of springs. For I have never found a love that pure as in the tree flowers whose scent quietly clings like stardust to the early twilights of March.
Art by Blenda Tyvoll.
Respite = a short break or escape from something difficult or unpleasant.
“I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death.” –Ernest Hemingway
Art by Marianne von Werefkin – Russian-German-Swiss Expressionist painter (1860-1938).
We are all unhappy people feeding on shines of never-ending stories of happier people around. Are we? Are they?
We are being consumed and trampled over over and over again.
After careful consideration and many well-built walls and some exquisite moats I declare that happiness does not rest with (other) people. Happiness starts with just US.
Yes, people create magic with a mere smile on a windy, bleak, hopeless morning that speeds away with every bit of light. Yet we are tired of being sunned over and then led into a haze of misunderstandings and apprehension…
Still we are totally unhappy and utterly happy in our own world. After bitter disappointments with the people I hold dearest, I place my every happiness in my carefully crafted dome.
“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.” – Oscar Wilde
I divide my happiness by seasons and I season my dome with everything I love and feels warm to the heart. In the aftermath of winter I put my glorious bike trips in the cold into odes to spring – my poems about the coming of the Sun, the ladybirds and the folstitia…One can never write too many invisible stories about spring and hunt too many lilacs.
I have there my beautiful early mornings drenched in autumn rains and also in beautiful snippets of music.
I have there the fairy tale books I read on cold, misty and pointless winter evenings… I have there my every expectation towards spring like a dull root waiting for warmth and birdsong to make it come out into the crude light again.
I can do whatever, I can solve everything, people can blow all their freezing-cold thoughts all over me, still they cannot steal my glow, they can merely break some windows, because I am protected by all of these small beauties awaiting me under my dome.
They say pennies are the mother of pounds. Small, insignificant pleasures like the new moon or a beautiful flower are the mother of happiness.
First you’ve got to see the moon to be over the moon.
Art by Rob Gonsalves.
Your fire sieves stardust
on my lips.
It embraces and protects
like clouds a fragile autumn morning.
It ignites and flickers and burns
until the world becomes
You and me
and the wind in the trees.
Art by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894).
What is a dream
But the realization of
serene
wishes and happiness pure
prolonged and decaying
in the mere
cold, sticky and
shimmering blue
Covering
words that spoke of true
Love alive on the hills,
beaten by the winds
and slowly falling asleep
on the wings of winter.
© Iulia Halatz
Art by Emil Orlik, painter, etcher and lithographer born in Prague in 1870.
Love is a time thief
Perched in the tree of gold
adorned with emerald leaves
sparkling of hope in the dark.
Notwithstanding love is one
dimension to the solar knowledge
ingratiating
the strangeness of a country
that isn’t yours.
© Iulia Halatz
Art – “Whispering Eve” by British artist William Gilbert Foster (1855–1906).
Today I am on winter leave
As my soul is too heavy
with all the snowdrops,
violets and perfumes of spring…
Your heart is wondrous
and alone
till you find me
aching for lilies of the valley.
Art by Julius von Klever.
Like morning haze
clinging to sycamores
So is my love
Captive in the cave
of swimmers dancing
in the flicker of fires
Casting shadows
of things
that could be…
Art by John Singer Sargent.