MARIETA MAGLAS

MARIETA MAGLAS

THE KREUTZER SONATA

Puzzling, airborne males glowed

red, green, and yellow

like bathing in an excited polar sunlight

or like flashing spasmodically their mirrors~

femme fatale fireflies~

or like some Morse signals.

Hoped to be thrilled in unison

in an eye-blink,

on the highest peak

of the Great Smoky Mountains,

like those pure lights and darks

in contradistinction

played by Beethoven or

like those objects of love and hate

hindered by Tolstoy

in The Kreutzer Sonata.

This poem uses Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis in this need to underline the contrast between love and hate. Human beings are like candles, they need the love of God, which is a light for the souls, especially for those living in the darkness of hate. The Kreutzer Sonata, a novella written by Leo Tolstoy, is like a dissertation on the supreme abstinence regarding carnal love because it can become ''a hindrance in the service of God.'' Missing love can open an entrance to hate. Tolstoy uses married people to demonstrate how love can be transformed into hatred and why committing adultery in this search for "animal excesses" isn't really helpful.

The wife of Pozdnyshev betrays him with a violinist, Troukhatchevsky. The dagger of Pozdnyshev kills the wife, but cannot hinder the objects of carnal love. Love descends in the flesh and looses its own meaning.

Leo Tolstoy uses the music generated by the violin as a link with The Violin Sonata No. 9, Opus 47 played by Ludwig van Beethoven. Troukhatchevsky is a violinist. The whole composition is a slip of light into the darkness. The harmony of the piano turns into a disaster through an angry A-minor Presto and through a lively triple meter while generating thrills and while leading to a carefree F major. The result is a crash of A major chord in the piano. For Pozdnyshev, the music of the violin is powerful and seemingly overwhelms him. Affects his inner equilibrium. Losing equilibrium in a dramatic way can be a reason to kill. Pozdnyshev gets an illness of the soul, which is triggered by a carnal love being in contrast with his pure marital one and being against him. It seems that only her death can solve the problem. He searches for forgiveness, after that, in a passing world, in the ephemeral. The violinist escapes. The music leaves this drama while searching for another space. My poem uses the color and the sound to get mobility. The poetic words need shapes.

Using Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa struggles with his new human condition while being transformed into a giant insect, I have made here a parallelism between the people marrying and the fireflies mating. In the Kafka's work, Gregor is locked within and cannot open his own door. In his book, the music plays also an important role for changing. Gregor wants to send Grete, his sister, to the conservatory to pursue violin lessons. The brother and the sister are a subject to be developed here in a religious way. Through the picture in which the '' fur hat, fur scarf, and fur muff'' is worn by a woman, Kafka wants to give a symbolic meaning to this need for transformation inside the human being. Sometimes, the metamorphosis is dramatic and leads to death. It depends on what people accumulate during life. Anyone can be the ''next door to hating humanity'' and this fact can lead to a dramatic change. In my poem, I have compared the human beings with the fireflies. They can be found at night, along with the river banks in the Malaysian jungles or near Elkmont which is located in the Great Smoky Mountains. Fireflies use their own bioluminescence for a sexual seduction through the process of synchronizing their light secretions. During the period of mating, the males have a lot of methods to convince the females. Methods like chemical signals, glow, and flashing are used by species like Photinus, Photuris, Pterotus, and Pyractomena. An exception to this rule makes the females Photuris while utilizing mating flashes for the predation of the mate, which is eaten. They are called "femme fatale fireflies". I wanted to compare the act of killing the partner with a natural instinct belonging to the insects, an instinct which is brought to its own limits by a Morse SOS as a flash in the mirror. The insects are intelligent and this is why Kafka chose this kind of metamorphosis.

The polar sun refers to Aurora Borealis. It is about physics. In the excited atmosphere, the hydrogen atoms add electrons. Emitting light makes the proton aurora have a variety of colors like a prism. The bioluminescence of the fireflies is extrapolated to Aurora Borealis. The colors reach the prism of life. Aurora is also the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology announcing the coming sun. Aurora had a mortal lover and she transformed him into a cicada, a bug which has an extremely loud song. Probably the source of this kind of transformation comes from here.

ECHOING SHELLS

His shadow seemingly runs away;

disappears into the blazing sand.

Wet rays hit the skin;

change the meaning

of the colors.

A new song cannot be heard;

'tis not born yet.

Waves covering dead shells,

lost steps, and destroyed castles

echo with the inner silence.

Battleships are eaten imperceptibly

by the horizon.

Gales remain to scream

in the blue, while bringing

ghosts to the shore.

'Tis a new time in the old one~

always different.

Nature seems to be the same;

suffering brings peace

in an invisible way~

in this need for love.

SUMMERTIME DELIGHTS

'Tis almost charming and a true delight

To feel, in summer, the mosquitoes bite.

And when the sluggish sun breaks its own crust,

The wind can teach you how to smoke some dust.

But when the air smells of somnolent bliss,

Any bee can give you its sweetest kiss.

When you are quite bored and you stifle yawns,

Spunky crickets trigger songs on the lawn.

Don't think to go for a refreshing swim!

Jellyfish come beneath the surface dim!

Maybe at home, the things can turn out cool,

But your car can stop when it's out of fuel.

THE PICTURE

She descended from the picture

to sit down on her empty chair.

Her yellow tongue kept silence.

She was in the middle of nowhere.

Her cubic dreams dissolved

in the reality of her

fashionable loneliness - a mask.

In the still air, a bird like

a huge cross made of icy love

brought transparency.

She took her personal diary

and started to jot down

phrases about

some lost pieces

of life. The old words

that had been deposited there

looked like those dried leaves

belonging to an

unfashionable herbarium.

Her diary was not green at all

while keeping safe

her unique love,

longing for a little life -

two elementary cells

subsiding into a

biochemical contemplation,

seeds growing

in the humungous womb

of the earth to become

future flowers.

On the retina of her eyes,

lost, fossilized worlds

have been still existent.

She looked into the mirror

to see the unseen.

She understood her death.

She would leave that space to go

somewhere where

she could hope against hope

to find a little happiness.

She would go, but she did not.

She disappeared into the picture.

MARIETA MAGLAS

MARIETA MAGLAS:  Ardus Publications, Sybaritic Press, Prolific Press, Silver Birch Press, and some others published the poems of Marieta Maglas in anthologies like Tanka Journal, edited by Glenn Lyvers, The Aquillrelle Wall of Poetry, edited by Yossi Faybish, A Divine Madness: An Anthology of Modern Love Poetry, edited by John Patrick Boutilier, Near Kin:A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, edited by Marie Lecrivain, Three Line Poetry #25 and #39, edited by Glenn Lyvers, ENCHANTED - Love Poems and Abstract Art, edited by Gabrielle de la Fair, Intercontinental Anthology of Poetry on Universal Peace and Love, edited by Madan Gandhi, and Nancy Drew Anthology: Writing & Art Featuring Everybody's Favorite Female Sleuth (Silver Birch Press Anthologies) (Volume 15) Paperback – October 1, 2016, edited by Melanie Villines. The poems of Marieta Maglas have been also published in journals like Poeticdiversity, edited by Marie Lecrivain, I Am not a Silent Poet, edited by Reuben Woolley, and Our Poetry Corner, edited by Ron DuBour. Her book of poetry, Cubic Words, was published by Aquillrelle.