Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

Palace of Dreams

The ballad of a lost serenity,
complex notes delivered on the strings of a violin,
it might be an absolution:
her appalling soul to remain hither for eternity,
as she attends to the tune, finally fit to find the beauty within

The scent of honey spreads across the green field,
accompanied by the quiet of the stream,
a glimpse of the emerald vision that provides her a gift:
to exhale the pestilential impulse until she’s healed,
could it be that, at last, her soul has been redeemed?

The flow of the rivulet begins to make a sound,
an odd, unsettling echo of the lost voices she’s entombed;
a curse she’s brought down on herself is about to be found,
the thunder, once her friend, reveals the melody of the forever doomed

Whilst the field starts cracking,
the stream assumes a vile shape;
the sufferers of her cruelty are commanding to be mourned,
their trapped souls begging for the much anticipated escape
from the terror deeply rooted in their souls that have been scorned

The scent of honey is to be discovered no more
as the echoes of her terrors are morphing into screams,
the scenery before her very eyes shifts into something gore,
the mistress of the dark still remains trapped in her palace of forbidden
          dreams.

 

Elmedina Hota is an artist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. After graduating High School of Textile, Leather and Design where she’s studied fashion design, she’s proceeded to obtain a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Faculty of Political Science, University of Sarajevo. While studying journalism, she’s discovered her love for mixed martial arts. She is a proud member of MMA Fighter Academy Sarajevo, and she represents them on various MMA and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournaments. Still, her love for sports did not diminish her passion for photography, photo editing and – writing! She enjoys writing dark fantasy, apocalyptic poems and stories based on her deepest fears and nightmares.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.