Lord, how much life can reside in a tree?
I don’t even know his name, but then
I write down my poems every day
On pieces of paper made from his skin.

He has witnessed my winter tears
And I have enjoyed his blossoms when it’s warm
Even though my window, looking to the sky,
Doesn’t reach as far as his outstretched arms.

When I’m in pain, he
Sings my tribulations.
Even then, between us
There’s a silence so enormous
That it takes in everything
From madness to desperation:
Blasphemy, the miracle above,
Prayer and a cry of love.

Sometimes, after ages of this silence between
Us, a single leaf falls down. And then,
Without knowing why, or what the cost,
A grateful universe learns by heart
What it’s lost.

by Ana Blandiana, translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea

You were so absent while washing
your face in the morning, you never saw
how the linden in the courtyard reached a limb
through the bathroom window and shook
sticky seeds into your hair. Your hair grayed
in this working class neighbourhood you’d heard
already as a child smelled like a ruined life.
The turrets of the little Russian church
once looked so fragile to you – you wanted
to feed them carrots from your hand
and croutons. Your heart was alive.
Your heart was like an iodine rain
over a crowd of crushed heads.

By Dan Sociu, from Sentimental and Naïve Poetry, translated
by Oana Sanziana Marian

time is circling its core like a villain
streets are running under my feet
is that the inflamed sky

call me your fortune teller, disaster, whatever
I condemn you to the bestiary of my clarity
you'd better make up  another camouflage or transparency,
a savage new name for devilry each day

you smile an unfiltered smile,
like a Sisyphus of tease and play

the rawness of things suspended in the air
an invisible hand pushes the hours through us into the compost and delight of memory
I don't have words for tomorrow, only your name today and warm tears.  I was born into a dead language so
I have this detector for the silence of windows, it sneaks in my lungs
pain is offline, the dark swallows itself
no wonder last night I dreamt a girl in a blue kimono
-you are my hiroshima, I breath like a prehistoric fish-
she was smiling to something only she could see.
love, this prehistoric wonder,
a fragile skin of this weary world

spectacle society or a faceless society? who could tell. after historical laughter comes a historic dread. when the sky is the limit of power we are doomed to endure the mania of failing floors. nothing is trully free to harm reality, not even poetry, and whose reality is more real. words like disfigured worlds,  they hack the body time. what is beauty and what is truth, this complex breathing creature in an unknowable form, this  hidden vulnerability: we can't bear who we are, we want to sink in a history without memory.

here it is, the paradise circus
a kind of massive attack
a kind of antimusic
mindlessness, a great improviser
let's make nonsense beautiful
let's write the chronicle of cruelty
oh, the boredom of bling,
we've seen it before, the corruption of words
besieging the nakedness of light
the illusionist in chief and his linear obsessions
will decompose our composure
klingonians are here, what if
the future is tyrannically dreaming
in digits a parody
of reality

At the border between garden and orchard,
an old door
with a rusted padlock. Rusted by rain or dew?

We walk through it barefoot blissful, cherubic.
My name: Volatile

Grandmother’s apron, a white cloud
scented with lavender
under which I’d bend my head
when the lamb gave birth,
sowing the air with as many photons
as star seeds
over hills, in summertime.

Then, the timeless joy –
children by the pond
gazing at the orange mill
brimming with moon.

Under the beam,
the braid of garlic cloves
– tiny lanterns
illuminating my height
on the spine of the door,
marked there by father,
his hands fragranced with walnuts,
and on the windowsill
the little sack of seeds waiting to defrost.

At the border between clay and star,
a narrow door
through which only we
could squeeze,
on a path of light.

by Liliana Ursu, translated by Mihaela Moscaliuc