Nicole Sara

Black moments bite, they take their share
and leave a sorrowful mark
Black moments burn, feeding on air,
with flames shaping the dark

Black moments blow like fierce winds moaning,
unleashing ice through the days…
Black moments beat an unyielding tempo
stifling the magical rays

Black moments breathe through smiles and light,
turning our eyes from the sun
Black moments breaking free from the fetters,
transforming nights into white

Black moments beg to be painted sweet blue,
green or yellow or pink…
Black moments bending the time and the skies,
spewing an eerie ink

For black moments bathe the wonderful air
in mantles and curtains of night
becoming the bridge for the cold deep sighs
towards bright beautiful flight

Nicole Sara is a bilingual poet from Romania, with a master’s degree in Philology and American Studies from the “Al. I. Cuza” University in Iași. She loves languages and performing magic with words. Nicole began by writing poems in Romanian, and in 2016 she started pairing the originals with their translation into English. She finds inspiration in the beauty and intelligence of everything around her. Rhyming Dreams, Nicole’s debut collection of poems and original photographs, was self-published on Amazon in 2024, and she has recently published her second collection, The Blues and the Beautiful. Her work also appears in the literary magazine Spillwords Press, on the Masticadores platform, as well as inTranquility: An Anthology of Haiku published by Literary Revelations and the 2025 edition of Sunflower Tanka Anthology – Dreams compiled by Robbie Cheadle and Colleen M. Chesebro. A nature enthusiast, Nicole also loves exploring the outdoors and capturing images to share on her blogs and on photography sites. Connect with Nicole on her blogs at starrysteps.wordpress.com and doarnicol.wordpress.com (bilingual blog) as well as @nicoles.steps on Instagram.

This poem appeared in What We Hold On To: Poems of Coping, Connection, and Carrying On — Winter 2026, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.