by Andrada Costoiu
Both my parents are cancer survivors. This month people come together to honor cancer survivors and raise awareness about reducing cancer risk. This is me, walking for my parents.
Inspired by someone dear to me.
You, woman, man, or whatever you identify with, are like fire. With sparks or sometimes smoldering, you burn, you unfailingly burn….
Now, at the end of the year, it’s time to look at the balance: assess what you have achieved, what is it to do. You have dreams, plans, thoughts…. and together with them, your mind is wondering how many people have warmed up by your fire. How many have found hope in your words, how many have smiled, how many have found light or a bit of safety when there was darkness around them? Did they come? Did they? Are you alone?
Only you, deep down inside yourself, know what you’re feeling. And, just you, alone, now at the end of the year, put some more wood on your fire… to continue burning, for yourself … and for others, for the people that you know and for the ones that you don’t know.
Let it be a good year for you! I wish you to burn full of life and full of dreams, and at the light of your fire to fulfill everything that your heart and mind desires!
Photo by Rikonavt on Pexels.com
I kneel
Conjuring ancient thinkers
To ask a simple question: is death forever?
People who played their parts,
Figures of finest wisdom,
Begin seating themselves on the floor opposing to me.
The sound of a suspicious silence
Fills the room,
The consciousness of being both,
The living and the phantoms of this world,
Sends joint, mysterious and significant,
Explanations of the meaning of life.
The room is bright,
Serviceable candles are steady,
They’re lit by poets….
I can’t pretend not to feel what I feel,
My wings that grew between storms
Spread wide to carry me once more
Towards another day, towards another night.
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
My new poetry book “Love poems: insights into the complicated mystery of love” is available on Amazon. You can get it here. Please write a review if you get around it. I would really appreciate it.
Here is another poem, a bit heavier than the other I posted the other day, than has also been published in the Literary Yard. I hope you will enjoy it. You can read it in the Literary Yard here.
Photo : “Believe By Force”, by Kai Stachowiak
Hear your soul
by Andrada Costoiu
Bemused from the perusal,
Of walks through the world’s faiths,
You’re seating at the table of your life,
With present and the future you,
Still searching for enlightenment,
Still wishing that it is much more you knew.
Define the undefined, and feel it!
Your animated consciousness does that everyday,
Then why to find the answer,
To soul and its existence,
Is still uncharted way?
Behold the contradiction, the chatter of two sides,
As far apart as ever, both struggle to be guides.
One says that it’s your body the vessel for your soul,
The other that these two are indivisible and whole.
The inner music of your thoughts secretly shouts: ”I am immortal”!
Convincing, but certainly revised by your sense of the natural world.
Your heart pulsing beneath your chest breathes life,
You think, maybe your story didn’t last long enough to know the answer.
But then you lock eyes with yourself in the mirror,
You see,
Your soul, the silent actor,
Sealed tightly with the corks of your unfettered nature,
Assimilating, crystallizing, metabolizing,
The pain and the pleasure,
The gain and the loss,
The hideous and the lovely,
The demonic and the divine!
You feel yourself emerging countless times,
With purpose and determination,
Shoving away in scorn,
A vast blind history of explanations,
Of our origins and of the destiny of being born!
The chatter quiets and you listen,
The waters of your mind are clear and quiet,
And in their depths you see the wisdom of the untold aeons of time,
The energy and love,
Unquestioning, complete,
Beautiful and hopeful,
Becoming you.
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2019 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
Photo: “Path In The Woods”, by George Hodan
My steps leave marks on the dirt I walk upon,
Next to so many others,
Big and small marks,
I wonder whose stories were or are these….
Drums’ cadence, silent and loud,
Dictate the rhythm of the live orchestra.
Planning, grinding, gripping,
Life in an orderly fashion,
As the clock keeps ticking: time for this, time for that.
I dared to let myself stumble,
That’s when I’ve fallen “out of step” and crashed into the arms of unfelt emotions.
I feared that without the cadence of drums I had no idea of who I am,
But I couldn’t let their sound pierce my soul anymore,
And dance me into the oblivion.
It became a question if I would stay fearful or not.
Tear after tear, I cried my way out to freedom.
Unraveled, I threw myself into the sea of unplanned knowledge,
I might be arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,
Or I might be sailing on a little ship under a beautiful blue sky.
Everyday I walk my own path…..
My steps leave marks next to others,
Big and small,
I smile and wonder whose stories were or are these….
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2019 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
Photo: Martin Birkin, “Dandelion 1″
Dark! Dark!
Do you feel that?
It’s my hand pulling you forward,
Through the dark tunnel of a lost cause,
Where time of your life was already spent.
“Come on! You can do it!”
Do you hear that?
It’s the voice of faith,
Your voice that merges with others,
Me, you, walking the tunnel.
You’re dragging your feet…..
Does it ever end?
Tough! Isn’t it?
Life is tough.
You feel in the holes, you jumped into some,
You crawled through mud chasing your dreams.
Are you tired?
Has your mind and body gave in,
In your organized preparation,
To become who you really want to be?
“Where are we going?” you ask the others,
Walking, crawling through the tunnel,
Next to you.
“We are walking out, keep going!”
And one by one, people come out,
Returning to sunshine and a sky with no clouds,
Returning to the innocence of roaming through the fields,
To the dandelions,
Waiting to make all dreams and desires come true.
And so they pick another dandelion,
Wishing in their hearts, and believing that their wish will come true.
Note: Life is a journey, and there are many dark tunnels. It is tough, but I believe that the beauty of the human spirit lies in our hopes and dreams. Keep listening to the whispers of your hopes, keep chasing your dreams, no darkness lasts forever.
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2019 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
Photo:Mohamed Mahmoud Hassan, “Mentor,help, Climbing, Hand”
Good for you,
All of you that have lived beautiful love stories,
Have broken your heart and then got up,
Wiped your tears and carried on,
Towards another day, and another story.
Good for you,
All that face sickness,
As we all think that disease is never part of us,
Until it is,
Good for you for conquering the fears that are whirling in your head,
Good for you for choosing and fighting to be a survivor,
You are our teachers,
Because you have an extraordinary capacity to rebound and survive,
And you can show us how to stand up when life puts us down.
Good for you,
All of you that have dreams, and have broken your wings chasing them,
Only to get up,
And fly higher than before.
Good for you,
All of you that have lost yourselves,
Had fallen, cried, and then got up,
And walked with your head up high, not hiding your permanent scars.
None of us has an innate toughness, but you have built your own,
Re-framed your life after a deep upset,
And now you teach us resilience and strength.
Good for you, all young and old,
Damaged and hopeful,
That have been through the hoops of life.
There is no grand script for life,
And each has his own,
We are all worthy and free,
To spin our versions of our stories.
Good for us,
Humanity has lasting worth and meaning,
Make your story count,
And don’t forget that after a tear, and a hurt,
You will always be stronger.
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2019 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
Photo: Kondo Yukihiro, “Ballerina At Backstage”
Nobody walked her path,
She carried her sorrows with grace.
Everybody starts somewhere different,
But she had many judges, all of them wrong.
She put away rejection slips,
Into a drawer full of pain.
“ I’m not like the others,” she cried,
Hoping that people will understand that passions
Choose whom to embody and then never leave.
Her eyes danced,
In this small moment in time she was becoming.
“Your hair looks lovely,
It must have taken many years to grow it so long,” said one
“It did,” she thought,
But it took much longer to be here
And step into the stage lights.
With strong legs and a heart full of love,
She took her limitations and her vulnerabilities
And bought them to the limelight.
The music started,
And she did what she was born to do: she danced,
She was a one-arm ballerina,
Imperfect in a perfect world,
And perfect in an imperfect world.
Note: this is a poem about the struggle of being accepted for what we are. Our society is not very kind as people are being judged against existent stereotypes that are hard to break. We forget that behind any skin color, any missing limbs….there is a soul with hopes and dreams. That soul did not chose how it would be embodied. Whatever you might be, fight for your dreams. Whatever they might tell you, keep going forward. You are worth it, everybody is.
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2019 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
The world seems to have stopped,
Stopped its murmur,
Everyone stuck in their homes
Seem to be dancing on a flat line tune.
The unexpected has happened,
Your knuckles are going white from clenching down on the arms of your chair,
As you watch your world that has swallowed a virus,
Turning into a place that looks as the realm of soulless.
The empty streets in New York Square,
The empty canals in Venice,
Makes you think that every other soul on this planet
Has lost its sparkle,
That every other child stuck in the house
Has lost his rosy cheeks….
But behind each door with a broken handle,
Stands a man, or a woman, or a child,
Writing and constructing their own plot lines.
It simply depends where you focus your eyes,
To see that there is love, there is strength, there is hope.
Stuck in your chair,
Look up to the starts in the sky rather than in the darkness,
Sometimes changes are coming slow,
But when all door handles will be fixed, they will come all at once.
Renewal is coming,
Something bigger and better,
Trust your heart,
There will be more love than there will be hate,
There will be more good than there will be bad,
And there will be more light than there will be darkness.
On this tiny blue and green planet,
This quarantine has not been “that’s how the story ends”
But it is “ that’s how the story begins”….
© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2019 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Andrada Costoiu 