Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,'
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

from **Extravagaria

"thank you, my heart:
time after time
you pluck me, separate even in sleep,
out of the whole.”*

were I to perform
an autopsy of that morning
no verdict would be self-sufficient:
Love
bursting like a sudden dancefall
in my veins
your voice imparts shivering
to my plugged shadow
and the day goes offline
I offer my skin as a battlefield
for whispers
I wouldn’t compromise with
birds on wire
or diagnose my boundaries
when time is turned into gold dust
among your empty shirts
lodging the imploded silence
and your shaved smile
like a hurricane lamp

the word I hate most is
Love
it says nothing
nothing at all
about you
the hidden dimension
in my flesh
the shape of us
without mercy

so-in-time-so-inside or
as inside so in time
the plasma of thoughts far away
there in the spaces without meaning
the sprouts of faceless darkness
and systoles without time
I step from one silence into the other
and unshaped my body sings
I am babysitting my heart while the light loses its weight
on my shoulder
time is a pocket and I can hear only my blood

the luxury of mending this piece with that one
I am so complete when I am my feet
sometimes I don’t need a name
no need for one way roads
when quietly the dark sprouts me
and the days pass
without complaining

We are the terraced women
piled row on row on the sagging, slipping hillsides of our
                                                                                               lives.
We tug reluctant children up slanting streets
the push chair wheels wedging in the ruts
breathless and bad tempered we shift the Tesco carrier bags
                                                                          from hand to hand
and stop to watch the town

The hill tops creep away like children playing games

our other children shriek against the school yard rails
‘there’s Mandy’s mum, John’s mum, Dave’s mum,
Kate’s mum, Ceri’s mother, Tracey’s mummy’
we wave with hands scarred by groceries and too much
                                                                                   washing up
catching echoes as we pass of old wild games

after lunch, more bread and butter, tea
we dress in blue and white and pink and white checked
                                                                                          overalls
and do the house and scrub the porch and sweep the street
and clean all the little terraces
up and down and up and down and up and down the hill

later, before the end-of-school bell rings
all the babies are asleep
Mandy’s mum joins Ceri’s mum across the street
running to avoid the rain
and Dave’s mum and John’s mum – the others too – stop
                                                                                                for tea
and briefly we are wild women
girls with secrets, travellers, engineers, courtesans, and stars
                                                                                 of fiction, films
plotting our escape like jail birds
terraced, tescoed prisoners rising from the household dust
like heroines.

Pennyanne Windsor, from *Poetry 1900-2000 One hundred poets from Wales

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.*
Leonard Cohen

the night birds
do want to be saved from light
in the land of whispers
the toll of complexity is
their unchanged lament
trapped between layers
insecure inside the semiotic square:
what is real?
true?
imaginary?
what is true and not true? – the call of destruction
this terror, the impossibility of meaning, shut inside the
drawer with plastic bags
we made my house there
somebody had to play the fool
these are reality games
recognition games
language games
with no key for the other’s syntax
who is the subject in this grave of flesh?
reality should be transactional
but the silence turned its face away instead
the clear bodies without voice rejoice
nobody asked the body how difficult it is to bear a mind
“we all know it’s not true & don’t you dare recognize it”
“you should be happy with your life & happiness doesn’t exist
(look at my poor body)”
“you are on your own & don’t you dare disobey”
“you must prove yourself & you are no good without us”

the right to reality was still not invented
since we are mostly busy deciphering our own language
words are self-fulfilling

I’m caring my annihilation safe
in the silence of nails
in the exhaustion of tools
of axes
and all the other love words

my love is an aborted child, I do not shed the same tears, only the same skin saddled with puzzles inside the intersection of presence and absence. the outcome of irrational congruence being yourself all day long is not enough you my pain don’t really matter to me silences fall between my fingers or was it too loud when I asked to be touched?  I am not able of speaking about love today with a mouth full of noises all hiding places are equal to themselves only you my pain defy definitions although they call me primitive.( theory says I am supposed to have grown up to live by the standards of a self-controlled open system)
but you my pain are well aware, I am still primitive, ultraviolent when I laugh, when I cry, when I refuse to let go of the ****** horizons, of foreign faiths, the end of all dying days, the mixture of their cravings and solitude
they are caring their bows in the honour of their truths my pain looks so pale among so many others. This is my pain in honour of your pain.  This is one way of loving the sellers of illusions yes, I have to own the arrest warrant for my heart someday

yes, this pain is a proud beggar

There flows between us on the terrace
an underwater light that distorts
the profile of the hills and even your face.
Every gesture of yours, cut from you,
looms on an elusive background; enters without wake,
and vanishes, in the midst of what drowns
every furrow, and closes over your passage:
you here, with me, in this air that descends
to seal
the torpor of boulders.
And I flow
into the power that weighs around me,
into the spell of no longer recognising
anything of myself beyond myself; if I only
raise my arm, I perform the action
otherwise, a crystal is shattered there,
its memory pallid forgotten, and already
the gesture no longer belongs to me;
if I speak, I hear this voice astonished,
descend to its remotest scale,
or die in the unsupportive air.

In such moments that resist to the last
dissolution of day
bewilderment endures: then a gust
rouses the valleys in frenetic
motion, draws from the leaves a ringing
sound that disperses
through fleeting smoke, and first light
outlines the dockyards.

…words
fall weightless between us. I look at you
in the soft reverberation. I do not know
if I know you; I know I was never as divided
from you as now in this late
return. A few moments have consumed
us whole: except two faces, two
strained masks, etched
in a smile.

**Eugenio Montale

for Stefana, Aurora, Alexandrina, Elisabeta, Lina and all the women in whose tired hands the sun used to set

I can only write this in my own language
maybe people don’t have a name of their own
or a time comes
this apparent abyss, incommensurable
in the **** of time
they didn’t live with duty free promises
I wonder how they dealt with the blood
with their naked arms
furious at stones
            woman-pillow
the earth knew how to be quiet between eyelids
the wind was superstitious
no rush into a smile
they couldn’t predict the lipstick
and the tantric love
curses cross bridges
and their hair would hide
                woman-wheel
back then the sunset was still happening
and maybe an eyebrow would raise
the duty to yourself was not yet invented
only beautiful hats, some scarfs
swallowed pains, unrecognized feelings
                woman-pillar
                 woman-child
their smoked skirts and rebellious step
they used to descend into their hands and into sweating
they never went out of the sun
not to disturb the wise colours or the needle work
when the bones of their men screeched
morning would come
and they wouldn’t have woken them up
not even the ignorant god of enduring
                woman-silence
I’m sitting in the mirage of dresses, perfumes, high heels
and their names are searching for me:
the night of the hunter is not over
I would kiss their hands
for a portion of wonder
of patience
love looks for the oneself
in the other

they were much more
much less than
a name
fading

A slight confusion
of earth with water
of water with sky
enough for life

to be lived

**Irina Mavrodin

Things distance themselves from one another
in a desperate halo
your loneliness is an echo,
rolled between my ribs.

The table is going round
The walls are bleeding
blood is pouring from the chair
where I sit back;
piles of clothes
like some famished birds
are collapsing from
a perpetually cold sky.

Nichita Danilov, from  *It Might Take me Years

There is no greater joy, body of mine,
than going out in the city at night
watching the halo of the moon bitten by a cloud
and the traffic lights changing their colours,
the car cutting the air,
seeing the flower thief
bloodying his hands
with the explosion of a rose,
being the absentee of your loneliness
and going beyond the power of your eye,
watching a whisper
rising from the trees
and how, while you are departing, it calls your name,
you creature of the Earth, you call your own name,
losing yourself, oh, body of mine,
towards the outskirts of the city, where
the darkened meadow of the night is itself a mourning
of time, where desire
gives you the thrills of an eternity.

Gellu Dorian, from  *It Might Take Me Years

When the hand which writes takes a rest
it seems to me demonically transparent;
beneath its skin, veins like a few plants
in a fishbowl — and the blood
flows within and floods
the silence; its murmur through time
the unlived life of the ancestors
rushing into the light of my eyes.

Dumitru Chioaru, from *It Might Take Me Years

My curves are not mad.
Henri Matisse, *Jazz

when silence gives away its name
birds become electric
darkness is no more a story
in their wooden beaks
I stay at the beginning of thought,
decelerate reality
again and again
bread, pain, blindness
truth visits me in my dreams
sometimes
between desire & dying
shortcuts, blind alleys
Shangri-La and Valhalla
Nirvana & the hunting ground
Guadalupe
untitled self-portraits
fast heights
blinds & shutters
Spinoza's abyss
the chasm of reason
Kant's please mind the gap
pits of harmony
barren grounds
Prigogine's broken circle
lost aesthetic qualities
and the bit moves on

when silence is an unfinished canvas
waters, faces make an offering
and their names grow
when I am confused with the possibility
of the sea level
then I know where
my love
is

splitting every single second
is beauty
unadorned
could I remove the decimal point
from my dying breath
?

This was the temptation:
to rub the I against the you,
our thought against its images.
To feel.

We were there before, you remember,
without mother or father, without navel,
marked only by the first cut.
Free of weight, measurement, destruction
we wandered inside each other, dreamt worlds,
lived.
But the stakes were too low,

the risk — only a game.
Desire was action,
instantly complete.
And that’s the way (remember?) we got here too:
by a single desire,
by a glance.

And now we’re here, in the viscous air,
rubbing this in, with effort —
every single sensation, every meeting.
Our suns rise and set,
our worlds get old,
but here:
suddenly we find
a new wrinkle in our soul,
and this — is for real. It’s real. Finally
we can lose, destroy,
finally we are alive.
For a moment
we can even die.

Amir Or, from *Let's speak you

In this vulnerable, resting, sunset light
the eye is thickened with shadow, deepened by absence.
Things hang in space, ground down by being seen, transparent —
and the mode they exist in now
is their mode of fading away.

The creating eye has weakened;
and the world that streamed — is almost already all sea;
whoever’s in front of me, behind me, at my side —
is me, but isn’t here.
And it’s already late. And the day’s over.
And we were left here, alone.

On the banks of the world
there we sat down, imploring our souls —
There we weep, eyeless,
when our gaze sinks into the great sea
and we suddenly remember
who we have been.

Amir Or, from *Let's speak you

things went accordingly
explosive by the book
consequently I found
pineful silhouettes
fossils of empty hands
floating poems
the boundaries of words
silk illusions or outrageous life
frozen layers of pain
pigments of pride
here is the splitting point
hey, don’t leave with me-crumbs
on your shoulders
I could make you the watchman of dreams
were they to loosen their grip

I am the daughter
of those serious people
without tears
the first flash of light-
the primordial invasion
violence against unformed space
a trapping container
I had to find escaping routes
from my mother’s womb
it chewed me out
it left me with no skin
so naked,  insane

I couldn’t try my birth before
only measure my pace
put it into question marks
spin around in memory-years
till it hit me that
I was so old
when I was born
not to hold on to
the vortex of wonder
the essence of reverie
the crest & zest of words
till I can make it
to the other side
of gravity

The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire, cooked
And tested here on earth, and it is a law,
Prophetic, that all things pass
Like snakes, dreaming on
The hills of heaven. And as
A load of logs upon
The shoulders, there is much
To bear in mind. But the paths
Are evil. For like horses,
The captive elements
And ancient laws
Of the earth go astray. Yet always
The longing to reach beyond bounds. But much
To be retained. And loyalty a must.
But we shall not look forward
Or back. Let ourselves rock, as
On a boat, lapped by the waves.

the sensation of
wet hair
in my teeth
pretty much your touch
your loving so heavy
words - a safe hell
in the soul's cavities
I'd recklessly counted
the fork's teeth
till my bones were spread
in the cemetery of years
no one confiscated
our competition for enduring
the snow of silence
finally bears some fruit
the impossible breath
urged me to save
some cement smile
till I can separate loneliness
from fresh dust
in my tired eyes

I must have been practicing
the patience of wood
the strife-wife
the brutal lemonade
on empty stomach

I
Again the larkspur,
Heavenly blue in my garden.
They, at least, unchanged.

II
How have I hurt you?
You look at me with pale eyes,
But these are my tears.

III
Morning and evening--
Yet for us once long ago
Was no division.

IV
I hear many words.
Set an hour when I may come
Or remain silent.

V
In the ghostly dawn
I write new words for your ears--
Even now you sleep.

VI
This then is morning.
Have you no comfort for me
Cold-colored flowers?

VII
My eyes are weary
Following you everywhere.
Short, oh short, the days!

VIII
When the flower falls
The leaf is no more cherished.
Every day I fear.

IX
Even when you smile
Sorrow is behind your eyes.
Pity me, therefore.

X
Laugh--it is nothing.
To others you may seem gay,
I watch with grieved eyes.

XI
Take it, this white rose.
Stems of roses do not bleed;
Your fingers are safe.

XII
As a river-wind
Hurling clouds at a bright moon,
So am I to you.

XIII
Watching the iris,
The faint and fragile petals--
How am I worthy?

XIV
Down a red river
I drift in a broken skiff.
Are you then so brave?

XV
Night lies beside me
Chaste and cold as a sharp sword.
It and I alone.

XVI
Last night it rained.
Now, in the desolate dawn,
Crying of blue jays.

XVII
Foolish so to grieve,
Autumn has its colored leaves--
But before they turn?

XVIII
Afterwards I think:
Poppies bloom when it thunders.
Is this not enough?

XIX
Love is a game--yes?
I think it is a drowning:
Black willows and stars.

**
When the aster fades
The creeper flaunts in crimson.
Always another!

XXI
Turning from the page,
Blind with a night of labor,
I hear morning crows.

XXII
A cloud of lilies,
Or else you walk before me.
Who could see clearly?

XXIII
Sweet smell of wet flowers
Over an evening garden.
Your portrait, perhaps?

XXIV
Staying in my room,
I thought of the new Spring leaves.
That day was happy.

each tree is
a sound soft-spoke

to unwheeled sky
perhaps

or passing
cloud ― i would set

mind as
these trees: closeset &

filigree
like something once hubbed

& radial staked
out : taken root & grown past

its paring
having absorbed what heat

comes in to build a year-by-
year body

encompassing body: mind so
still in its s-

hell as to
be

detectable
barely till my

tomb stone
deep in upward shadow

leaps upon
me like a child around my neck

Mario Petrucci from *i tulips

Or you, father, pointing down to a Sicilian harbour ―
its dark pincers compressing an eye-glass
of water

Or my skin, watered down by a lifetime out of your sun
yet thick and dark through our blood’s long curing
in white light

Or your silhouette, insect-strange on the black breast
of a Northumbrian hill, our kinship of shape lost
in the white flood-down
of summer

Or that sequoia glade whose green we drank: a tall glass
where dark sank as heavier spirits do, and stirred leaves
made a white effervescence
of sunlight

Or you, black and white, slumped in that wicker chair
mourning your father, steeped in a kitchen’s shadowless
fluorescence, toe-caps scuffed grey
by the glare

Or rain, elsewhere, as white horizons laddered with dark ―
rain as fault-lines slanting the light ― till, here, resolve
the first cold drops, steaming on your curved
back of earth

Mario Petrucci from *Flowers of Sulphur

I came home pointlessly
endlessly
that day
the windows didn’t confess
I didn’t recognize anything
no, no more
I nailed myself on walls
-nothing really helped-
I sat on my bedside
facing the voracious truth of flesh
while my dresses were exploding
in the wardrobe
my furious love
erasing sunrise
between me and my skin
an alarming desire
happened that day
to clear the view
the life I’d smuggled
and hid away
the sons and daughters of darkness
were calling each other
in my hips
I put some makeup on my shoes
ready to face the world like this
woman
beast
no need to panic
there’s only this desire
unredeemed
to give away
a heart full of dire

I became one
with the other
another me
while
you were
beautiful
like a free day

it had to start somewhere
Odysseus never came home
only chaos promised to return
the dome of illusion will be (ful)filled
with stones
the mutual game of deception is over
the pride of the mountains collides
with itself
the rise of irony in history
the decay of fists
awaits dignity to play
one more card today
chaos chooses its roots
beneath the surface
inside millennia
of looking over the sea

godless promises await
mundane
a fresh horizon
of pain

but I knew its walls ripe with the hate of an ancient dampness
and the ceilings leaking and the floor quaking with hatred
and the neighbours lurking at the windows, to see what happens in our house.

four generations have hated in here incessantly, no one escaped it.
at our house, hatred acts like a replacement for icons,
food and beverage. without hatred,
Sunday pours over as turbid as lye.

in the beginning it was, maybe, just the hatred of one
deprived of love, but later, for those that followed,
it became a natural hatred, a
homely feeling, our title of nobility
and for some time now none of us has taken any comrade
but the one that he or she could hate the most.

especially at night, when the ending is close,
hatred nestles in its bedtime garments, bleeds between the sheets,
all night we turn from one side to the other
with our eyes focused in the dark to the other's bed.

the children have already learned it, know that nobody sleeps,
listen with their eardrums swollen by strain how the hatred crawls,
with the noise of a heavy spider, from one bed to another.
now it packs one into another and quakes, and from them
here comes a fresh smell of frozen dampness.

this nonetheless only for a few months, two-three years at most,
after which their blood
gets darker and the hatred sends down into them a somber conceit
and then we recognize them as being of our kind.

when I was born, I was born for this:
to take the hatred further, to throw it into children -
I do not matter, none of us matters,
only the hatred we pass on from one to the other matters.
we marry out of hatred. we make children out of hatred.
they must hate in their turn, because otherwise,
our more than a century-long heritage will go to waste.

and if we were not to hate, those prepared for it since childhood,
it would spread among you and we must be very careful,
because our regular doses may **** you,
although nobody can be sure that life
is just life.

Ioan Es. Pop
Translated by Anca Romete

“To live is to be slowly born.”*

that day
time reversed its memories
the interior waters were protected
the autumn fruits were quiet
in their sweetness
some joy was scudding by
leaving shy traces on the cheeks of the city

who called you?
not my screams
they were trapped in someone else’s
purposes
fear, indifference, emptiness, hate
were in the middle

you  were a passionate thief of glances
there had been many before
each time blood rushed inwards
you had a secret collection of lost heads

suddenly it started
my right hand started
to strip you of your dreams
my right ear kept the pace
in the colorful space
I didn’t mean to pry
into the tension of your jaw
saying “I am”
(thinking real hard)
into your frowning with your lips
and the intense split growing in the middle
pushing you and yourself apart
the uncertainty of your feet
ready to take off

it is fear
dissolving my presence
my skin stopped recognizing myself
every inch has a voice
I was disarmed
I descended into yourself
and you offered to me
my own mystery

Picasso was watching over our shoulders
to Degas’ ballerinas
hinting at the lack of faith
in your smile
-there are so many spaces
filled with non-sense,
I know-

I turned into a landscape of desire
with perfumed weeds
there was an ocean of eyes
between us
wonderful images rolled over my skin
what was your chest crushing?

to be or not to be engulfed
still a lottery
our preoedipal mothers were pointing
their fingers at the horizon
pain turning into more pain
turning into hate turning
into hope
this heaviness in the middle
their laughter and innuendo
heavy as a tomb stone

that day never came
when you had me
without hello
no theory convinced me
to understand
this centering love I feel
every time your smile
happens to me

dreamers never say
“I’m sorry”
just leave me there
I'll be consumed
one day

this light carries a secret desire
to bring the horizon nearer
to bear more hearts
more screams
the violence of breaking barriers
invisible forces of cohesion of dismantling
are playing in the innocence of an unborn language

their gestures interrupted by thoughts escaping tired bodies
their gestures flow into strange voices
to be is something
to be loved is everything
to love is still a mystery
how to hold on to your heart
as to wild horses

the principle of uncertainty
when there were no corners
not yet
the energy of thought
preformed
the roots of leaves
preconditioned
the land of images without boundaries
I was the king of taste
this vessel took
changing forms
each minute
I was one with my hand
with my towels
with the red cube
of desire
I want was enough
to destroy
the names of dawn
this vessel knows the route to chaos
our guarding mother
take me in your sighs
hold me somewhere
in the sleeves
of thought
let's do it
let's feel one last bit
of the pulsing wreckage
we are full of promises we made
to ourselves
to take the route
to the next level
of ecstasy
we need a container
let's do it
let's chase the semantics
away
what remains is
the fruit of day

smaller than the table, smaller than the chair,
smaller than my father’s big boots.
like a potato, that is how small I dreamt myself.
because in spring, they put the potatoes
in the ground and that was it,
till autumn they were not disturbed any more.

I dreamt myself in the planting pocket, among them,
sleeping sweetly in the darkness,
turning on either side in summer
and then falling asleep again.

and to wake up in autumn still sleepless
and unclean like my brothers
and when it is time to dig us up, to jump above
and yell: stop digging, stop digging,
for I shall willingly come home,
if you put me back in spring,
and in spring I am the first one
to be thrown back in the planting pocket
and so on, to always stay and sleep,
from the planting pocket to the basement and from the basement to the planting pocket,
for many years, deeply asleep and forgotten.

Ioan Es. Pop
translated by Beatrice Ahmad

when I carry you in my lips
I forget about my heels
eating cherries like a mademoiselle
(also called mademoiselle Chanel)
I don’t have to look in the mirror
there is summer in their look


you came to inhabit my lips
and the colours of words starve blinded
traffic lights repeat what they have seen
you will find your way over there
to the old carnival
inspiration of the living
no one dares to touch me
I am too much of an electrified cage

this woman wants to give herself to you
with the most natural lack
of grace
you can pray with my lips
for the rest of the day

it was not too late for some metaphors
I was trying to sleep
when the air said:
“I will take him from you,
and give him back
randomly
and white butterflies will grow
in your hair”

“he will have himself
that’s what matters”,
I said to myself
while time was left dreamless
and some butterflies
were carrying the sea
to the roots of sleep

words are a breaking through
from non-linearity of colours
hard to endure the abyss of green
the mind produces the world in excess
extending thought to the point of boiling
a breath of fresh air comes from the other side
a struggling music in the streets
cracked with wanting
sometimes it rains with desire
and neuroticised eyes
the politics of need is coined
in the land of no answers

I am an orphan of desire
my rightful eye is busy
farming for myself
new territories
the master and the slave are linked
by nails
and watery hopes

forget your words
there is silk over waters
there is more space
for immersion

I am an orphan
without my desire
to love
all the siren calls
devouring thoughts
of you

“Your silence has been with me and I have let it have its say. I feel, as always, the same closeness to you which your silence makes into a kind of speech of its own.”
Anne Sexton

"and if I remember
you are my memory
and if I forget
you do not fade away"
E. E. Cummings

"Your body is away from me
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.
From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly."
Rumi

"I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"If the truth can't be found through love, wherever it might be, it doesn't interest me"*

incessantly still
discontinuous
I will fall without name
I will fall into the restlessness
of your thigh

I will build my home
in the gratitude
of your palms

I dreamed these words
instead of you
one night
like any night

I will let go
of counting the hours
the faces, the tears
white corollas
sudden transformations

I have seagulls in my mornings
I have words of you
and the shores of memories
there’s you crumbling in my place
passion’s hidden crimes

I shake out the night
from my hair
and you are still there
to teach me
why

no residue of the future
don’t know what to say
the contours of words
bear enough ambiguity
mama and papa have moved
their battle inside
my anemia

a reversible memory, you
you’re not a battlefield
with poppies
the blues had just hit the road
to the city
while you were busy to be born
in the quietness of fields

this desire today
with silver teeth
shouted at me in the street:
“you belong to him”

it’s something
to have learned
how to deconstruct
the power of love
it’s a different matter
by your side
in the depths of whispers
in the cage of time

you’re not a dehydrated dream
of my unshed skin
I so elegantly raging
keep up with this desire

my life needs a soul
not to play cards
past present future
heavy in my arms
undiscernable

I am a sentimental girl &
I am afraid of you
of the darkness of sleep
of the blue annihilation
of truth

let me tremble a bit
let me taste some light today
I am round enough

I am round enough.

Nothing of what she had told me
proved to be true
not even wardrobes with thousands of dresses
not even a ballroom
neither garden with peacocks and harts
nor castle
which I've been looking for for three days
but have not found, her palace with view of the sea
of which I found nothing but the view of the sea
that, nonetheless, filled me with tenderness:
so she didn't lie to me after all
she is a good woman, she loves me

Matei Visniec
translated by Anca Romete

Who else could I be than the collector of wounds
yes, gentlemen, I came here to buy
some of your hidden wounds

no, gentlemen, the hideous scars are no more of interest to me
I now collect more sensitive wounds
secret traumas
wounds passed down to three generations
pains inherited at birth
thin cuts got at the time when your feelings took shape
anything that disappointed you at birth
now this is what interests me
the first interior drop of blood
the first words you pronounced
but which never ever healed again

Matei Visniec
translation by Anca Romete

An Eternal Shrugging of the Shoulders*

I am writing this poem in the dark
this is why I apologise to all who will read it
some words might overlap
                                   others
some letters might remain flat
I know my message risks to arrive truncated
                                   to its addressee
for that matter I feel how some lines are liquefying
as if my eye itself flows in them

presumably in the day when light will come back
this page will be a heap of signs
a hill lodged by ants
or even by more evolved beings capable
                                           of praying
however, the drama I have lived
will remain without a voice
the secret I wanted to hand down to you
                                         with this poem
will be an eternal shrugging of the shoulders

Matei Visniec*
translated by Manuela Chira

I’m writing in this language
to forget about myself
to spit out the caffe latte
my mother’s milk
and my father’s  coffee

the mind has diamond edges
virtual slopes
the body is a jungle
writing to me is like
writing to you

I’ll let go
of the spitting image of you
of me
no slogans
no slop

you are some unfinished poetry
in the unwritten me

Surfer Grandson Smoker
Manager Traveler Father
Daughter Cook Teacher
Mother Reader Lover
Trainer Son Painter
Volunteer Exhibitionist
Santa Claus
member of a fishermen club
tomorrow
or you name it
if you still have air

we left ourselves outside
alone with these explosive days
blind witnesses
have buried their faces
into the desert of time
the concentration of pain
remains a universal constant
the world is a helpless arena
of master plan illusions
what shall I become
or what shall be consumed of me?

and these rupture faults
body-dynamite against ego-dynamite
culture crushing nature versus
nature crushing culture
the soul famine
in the book
of unknown faces

we were all just enlivened cells once

while we feast in our blood
the discreet continuities
remain hidden
identity encapsulated
in the wave length
of supernovas egos

poetry is left with this
apparent nonsense
camomile turns into laughter
and the pride of butterflies
deserves better

this rhythm consumes us
faster than the speed of dreams
the speed of thought
the speed of forgetting
how our mothers
were never healed

to be or not to be simple
that’s a question

"I don't care if I don't look pretty
Big girls cry when their hearts are breaking"*

They wouldn’t let me cry, they could have felt the tender lies decomposing.  But this pain knows nothing of the theft of day, of how lemon tastes for you, of predicaments of truth.( The arrow of meaning goes backwards and forwards when it doesn’t get stuck.) Silence is nailed against every word. This old story: they are speaking in the corners: look at her. But this is not a poetic novela if you care to know, only misery exposed. This vital flaw of violins, of not being composed.  Not everybody knows to transmute pain into a bridge of light. Like Jarrett did. This pain doesn’t need words, images, metaphors, brutal as it is, like a mating season. The echo rests in stone.  This pain is a wall breaker. The taboo of words. I won’t say more. I would let myself live inside this large momentum, this much I can save for today. The magnitude of tears takes me there, so close to the one I love.

His severe face in a cloud over the waters of childhood
he rarely held my warm head
inclined to the presumption of guilt unforgiving
he uprooted forests straightened paths
carried the lantern high when we entered the night

I thought I would be sitting at his right hand
we would be dividing darkness from light
and judging the living
what really happened was different

a peddler of second-hand goods carted off his throne
and the mortgage record the map of our domain

he was born a second time slight very frail
with a transparent skin almost non-existent bones
he kept diminishing his body that I might receive it

in an unimportant place in the shadow of a stone

he grows within me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little
it takes to be reconciled

Zbigniew Herbert
translation by Oriana Ivy

“My wound existed before me;
I was born to embody it.”*
Joë Bousquet

No anaesthetic rhyming with aesthetic for the cracks of words now **** it! This pain keeps inventing skies to fall into, glass screams, corroded nails Crying comes from far away Words grow flesh Between fingers Herds are trampling on my heart inside plastic horizons This stupendous silence then Take my bones from yesterday Future is a catapult What if I am only a girl facing this      Breathe out

I am the possession/oppression The oppressor is me Pain is not a stylistic experiment Where can I hide my ears I crawled I bent Disfigured I had to pick up my eyes from fences, my lungs from the mirror I have a body full of used words, slapped doors, walls swollen by silence Hope to get used to be treated in the third person No poetics of space Pain is this quarry in me L’habitude of memory

i told you to stay away from mornings,
their raw sun is not for us.
whereas the blurred and heavy sun of our world
hardly steams up the horizon. we are
at the beginning of another world and of others suns.

you've remained alone. it's good. you have the whole past at hand.
you've seen evil with eyes wide open and you will heal.
one day you'll understand that everything that shines
brings death closer to you.

evenings, on the other hand, will please you here:
you are in the age of livid worlds,
half shadow, half unknown.
be welcome. here the future
has almost passed.

Ioan Es. Pop, **The Livid Worlds

let's pretend
we are not yet born
inside zebras
moons
layers
I just love the fragmented world
in your eyes
give me your pride
I'll clean the streets with it
I wonder who would notice
we are going to be born
from the womb of morning
with jasmine in our fingerprints
the world stares back
through glass eyes
ego psychology everywhere
like a plague
like a roller coaster
my butterfly heart
is moving the air
towards silence
I need to tell the difference
between you and you
but my eyes are full
of blue feathers
look, things have drowned
their names
dividing the depths
of living
I slowly phagocytate you
like a wave without direction
just before my eyes -
this rush, excitement, fear, quietness
this you-quality
suddenly turns into I-quality
as the belly of that
second empties itself
into no-more-than-life

I am ashamed that I am Spanish because of Franco
I am ashamed that I am French because of Algeria
I am ashamed that I am Algerian because of France
I am ashamed that I am American because of Bush, Iraq
and the bloodshed once among brothers
I am ashamed that I am Russian because of Stalin, Gulag
and recently of this and that
I am ashamed that I am German because of ******, clearly
(Pol *** appears more and more seldom in the lists, but one is horrified, humanly ashamed, remembering)
I am ashamed that I am English because of football etc
I am ashamed that I am Polish — only when I am not proud
I am ashamed that I am Turkish, but then there are Kurds...
I am ashamed that I am Czech and allowed myself to be stifled

(I am just as ashamed myself — some say, who feel
shame in its extremity and hide weapons in pantries, waiting for that moment
in which they wash away their shame with the blood of traditional enemies)
I am ashamed that I am Orthodox or Catholic and I wedge and split
the mountain on which Jesus bled — before others made even smaller
pieces out of his Golgotha below
I am ashamed that I am Indian because... well, it’s no matter
I am ashamed that being Macedonian I let the Greeks be even more
I am ashamed that I am Korean and one of Kim Ir Sen’s
I am ashamed that I am Korean no matter where, as long as
Kim Ir Sen’s Koreans remain
I am ashamed that I am Serbian, but... let me think
I am ashamed that I am Chinese because: ‘You’re Chinese?’
I am ashamed that I am Romanian because of Ceausescu, Dracula of course

and now, God, all these Romanians all over the world...
I am ashamed of my nation even when I am not ashamed
— but each of us seeks to forget something
I am ashamed because .......... [Everyone: fill in the blanks, write yours here!]

but you, but you — you, only you
you, whose nation filled the desolate earth with life and kindness
you are the man who begins the new day
today
with your first step

*Ioana Ieronim

don't rob this moment of its nakedness
better distill words
to the strength of this feeling
don't touch the sleep of children
future might turn back in rage
it's majestic
the way temples are erected
inside mitochodria
it happens unintentionally
Borges said it
beauty as a physical sensation
never mind being wiped out
new roots/fingers/words will grow
in your wrath
the vibration of thousand mornings
will not suffice it
(don't confuse pleasure with beauty
or make up with follow up)
if god were a sensate being
I would kneel
in front of a sea with no paths
I cannot explain
what the consistency
of your bones
means to me
there is no way
more simple than this:
what if beauty
is?

“I have loved you so much that I believe I understand you a little.”
Marcel Proust

we are wearing our glowing skins
full of unwoven whispers
or au contraire
we’ll have worn them
-who knows
in poetry, not in theory,
anything is possible-

one of us could say
“take this animal
out of my eyes, teeth, bones
for wild flowers
to grow in my sockets”
and I’ll say:
“for my eyelids to rest
in the shadow of your breath
and my vertigo, indigo
in the nest of your palm"

-words are just riverbeds-

see you - the sea in me
at the echo point
of blood

I’ll wear rivers
lipstick
bluebirds

in this poem of touching
every cell is spinning
its nucleus of *numinosum
while the day breaks open
into the heart of trees

-words are stones of silence,
unintelligible altars-

I was in love
with a vertigo man
last time I checked

blood has its madness

the heart is partly eye
the eye is partly heart
the clay You made us with is well kindled
since we set fire to fire
and we stay in the oven of the three youths
we are kindled from the same flame
love gives a fingerprint to the heart
above the stretched body of death, we shall be ploughmen.

*Ioan Silviu Batariuc

“A woman needs to find a way of creating boundaries that is not a violation of her instinctual feeling of wholeness.”*

daring like a ballerina
simple as a peach orchard
she loves me like a daughter
from the height of wonder
I look at her with innocence
like a mother
I teach her how to stare in the sun
to see flowers of light
the fragility of colours
and how stories happen in the dark
the hardest part is letting go of knowing
reinventing the smile
words stand there not pretending
tangible, waiting to be broken
here is everything letter by letter

cruel and demanding
like a song, like a perfume in autumn
“I lend you my fairies,
you lend me your arms”
silk embraces
uncracked choices
I follow her into laughter
She follows me into tenderness
little exchanges, attunement, failures
when to draw a line
when to plunge into circles
store fat miracles
a grasshopper is coming in
propelled by the infinite desire

“you don’t have wrinkles, mama”,
she laughs
a bird came to nest in your heart,
don’t frown, mama
let’s yell to scare baubau
"should I make it yellow?"

every day she’s mapping my honesty
giving me her burden of childhood
and we found ourselves raw and dreaming
in between hearts

In the sea caves
there's a thirst there's a love
there's an ecstasy
all hard like shells
you can hold them in your palm.

In the sea caves
for whole days I gazed into your eyes
and I didn't know you nor did you know me.

*Giorgos Seferis