Colorful days, sweet nights
Take time to pause
Leaves are changing

Leaves are turning a new page
You have to forget all the rage
Take time to pause

Leaves are changing
Leaves are changing
Leaves are changing

Here you are in a new day
It don’t matter which way
Forget what others say
Leaves are changing

Colorful days
Sweet, sweet nights
Colorful days

Watch the leaves
Changes are on the way
Forget what others say
Live for today

Autumn leaves
Autumn leaves
Autumn leaves
Leaves are turning

Watch the leaves turning
A new life is burning
Changes are on the way
Forget what others say
Leaves are changing,

From sunrise
to sunset
we learn to
make our way

From dusk
to dawn
we lay in
the bed we've made

We rise
to fall
That's the only
way

No one
escapes their fate
except in their dreams
while on the bed they lay

Where everything
is made right
from wrong

to the bed
of dreams
we've gone

Autumn leaves burning
In the backyard
The scent accented
By a nearby
Lilac tree

What a weird thing
Memory

Like the shack
Closed door
Dusty sneakers
On the floor

Exploring bodies
And fantasies
Galore

Don’t let the hinge bend
Keep it shut
If they don’t see
It didn’t happen
I mean…
We’re only friends

Where did all the love I gave go
When you’re young it’s effortless
So easy to give away
And by the time it’s too late
You’re searching your whole body to muster up anything to hand over
Anything to be enough
To fill you up
If all the love my heart gave is still out there
With no place to go
Pray it knows
It’s welcome back

Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
the weeping of an uninvented eye
the tear of the eye
of the one who must be beautiful
of the one who must be happy.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venice's,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru