Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

-Diamond Sutra, ca. fourth century CE

blue insomnia have woken up in my words
seeds of wind, the lament of unknown men, women
the impossible alphabet of terror
daily I pass by the same cemetery
the willow-trees have new leaves now
the words can' swerve while
their faces dissolve slowly deeper and deeper into death
and I’m holding mine into hands smeared with tears

he  loved me like
they loved their neck rope

we see through the night
what we can
empty jars
purple lies
hardly the collection of killings
that makes
the morning sing

death has no words

you, yes, you
I need you to feel
more alive
and that's the end
the beginning of
any metaphor

I teach your name to the breath of words,
to the folds of dusk, to the quiet cups of morning
then I turn inward to who we are beneath the surface of silence.
no thread of certainty but rhythmic pulses I feel  
the horizon’s glow is fading
I craft love from the certainty of unspoken fears 
I etch poetry into the air to sooth my eyes from absence

something must have happened
many times on my lips
further away into the liquid world
before the world
and on my knees full of devotion
I'm laughing a lot more nowadays
no longer baffled at the sun's *****
"seduction is the mother of wisdom" -
said the poetess
combing her hair with precise movements -
I drag my amniotic desires on to every door
I see
I'm recklessly alluding to my lover
with thick eyebrows
or to how to turn the light off
I am no longer covered with skin
when the lightest of waters dreams
between the yearning and the scream

I'll watch the birds wane tonight
tomorrow perhaps

Dear E. S.
poetry
is the world the human race
my own life
all flowered from the word
the transparent wonder
of a delirious ferment

When I find
one single word
in this my silence
it is hewn into my life
like an abyss

Giuseppe Ungaretti

the end gets harsh. many of you
now fall pray to doubt.
nobody forces anybody, but somebody,
nevertheless, must give the orders.

the acids have grown lazy and fat.
something more cruel than they are must be found.
if you give up now, if you do it now of all times,
neither the tomb nor the sky will cover you sufficiently.

you are the possessors of the alternative and this is
the only one. that's why i've talked to you about her
in so many ways.
the little that is about to disappear lies now
only in you and in your power.

a black shell pulls to the shore.
i didn't say that everybody is climbing aboard.
but the quiet fright with which we work on the stars
will stop them from falling for a while.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

This sacred sadness of the clouds
painted on the window pane.
This end of a century
splashed all over the walls!
The evening flowing down streets like heavy water...

...Who opened these windows in our foreheads,
who built these
secondary doors in our chests?
I walk inside me as if in a diseased season.
I hear mother’s voice from beyond the dark wall:
Why are you here,
why have you come back?
Go, out with you while there is still time.

I hear my elder brother’s voice as if muffled by water:
Get out of this light as soon as you can
and leave me alone
to breathe in my own shadow...

Whose faces are preserved here,
in this putrid evening light?
What season are a thousand
cut-off heads waiting for?
Whose arms will be sown in the field,
whose teeth will grow in the grass?

I walk across myself as if I were some strange season.
With Yorick’s skull in my hands, I wonder:
If I have reaped
where and what was it I reaped?
And if I harvest, when, whom am I harvesting?

**Nichita Danilov

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

Right here - one small step away -
right now - the moment that this has added
itself to and became the past -
I heard myself calling me from all that follows

stretch my hand out as I may
the horizon comes no nearer to making sense -
but if I answer it is likely someone else
will answer back beside an echo

my eyes are tired of dreaming -
it's like a bird thirst when it flies over the sea -
they crash into reality
if I could only put myself out
in the man I ought to be

Ioanid Romanescu, from Orpheus
translated by Stavros Deligiorgis

that moment
as fragile as a snowflake
when I slip into another's poem
and something inside twinkles
like a firefly full of wonder

"Be the bliss of my trembling
like a tree’s leaves:
give a name, give a beautiful name
a pillow to this disintegration."
— János Pilinszky

the women burn
their solitude in desolate pans
their underwear smells of blind hands
of running in the sun
of death a little
a moment of silence are wearing
between the legs
these women with still ****** hips
and the maniac blood slowly ascends
into nakedness

all they need is
faith

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

we knock on the doors for them to open, to
let us out, but those on the other side don't hear us and
they too knock on the doors for us to open and let them out
and when they open it's ourselves we bump into
but we don't pay attention to ourselves and we say we want out
and they say we want in, don't take the door away with you,
we wouldn't have anything to open on the way out,
there would remain a blank spot in the wall,
we won't find any way to get out.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

you wear my skin as a coat
in the morning light
storehouses of tears
bridge my thoughts
of you
what is this je ne sais pas
biology, art artefact,
genocide of reason?
politics of satisfaction?
yes and no and maybe:
life playing a vitality game
with itself

there is a cosmic spin for
unborn thoughts, gestures,
meanings.
a house full of empty things,
the past. for non-believers.
****** traces on my skin
left by the wind, the sea, the fields
a tapestry of dread cause silence
was a cathartic violence

sit next to me and we'll watch
the elusive rhythm of gravity
pulling our cells in the same direction
to a new species of desire
unabridged

Language thus becomes an instrument of "spirituality", that is to say, of the direct transmutation of desires and emotions into presences and powers that become "realities" in themselves, without the intervention of physically adequate means of action.

Paul Valery, from "I would sometimes say to Mallarme..."

I am deep into the dark forests of the soul
where everything is hyperreal
me is not me you is not only you
too much is together and the mind just a narrow stream
I am listening to the old cries as if souls are passing through me,
as if I need to understand what the birds are saying to each other

the route to understanding is through this dense unknown
and when I might find it I leave it guarded by the certainty of clouds passing by
so hard to see inside your mind inside your kind inside your bones
aliveness is a killer, the mind has its own temperature
the body already knows everything I have to find the vitally wise language
I feel the natural dance of the opposites, the flight and the fall, I need some other dimensions though to get out the whirlwind
feelings flow like the contour of a distant lighthouse distant fire distant aurora,
the silence of the light a true companion for conversations in the dark

I feel free for a while now
my shadow turned into a fountain
I am one with myself and
the darkest shade of blue
I carry no longer empty hands
his shadow her shadow
patience makes the shoes lighter
I imprison myself when I see only
halves of colour

I feel free to have fried chicken
and a salad now
I have only my own destiny
to carry around

Like this stone
of Monte San Michele
as cold as this
as hard as this
as dried as this
as stubborn as this
as utterly
dispirited as this

Like this stone
is my unseen
weeping

Death
we discount
by living

Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1916

wait

wait
you say
don’t late this day
let it early
away

never

when all my roads
are closing down
you take me to this
never
town

open

you kicked a door open
in my mind
before
your
more

soul

soul is a ball of fire
enclosing memories
which do not
want
to lose the body
they hire

hug

this tired day
at the corner of age
hugging your words
floating in that air
that mediterranean
that balcony over the waves
that
you

Lidia Vianu**, from *My Cup of Light

For the kids the first ending of the world.
For the cat a new Master.
For the dog a new Mistress.
For the furniture stairs, thuds, my way or the highway.
For the walls bright squares where pictures once hung.
For the neighbors new subjects, a break in the boredom.
For the car better if there were two.
For he novels, the poems - fine, take what you want.
Worse with encyclopedias and VCR's,
not to mention the guide to proper usage,
which doubtless holds pointers on two names -
are they still linked with the conjunction "and"
or does a period divide them.

Wislawa Szymborska from Here New Poems
translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh

yes, it is real, as real as daylight
how history recycles itself
darkness is falling with the speed of thoughts
of certainties, of pathos, of a wounded hope
I feel like screaming, I feel like weeping and
this can change nothing, and I can't find a better metaphor
we hurt each other unwittingly if we stop thinking together
if we stop talking, stop listening to each other
how vulnerable we can be, how deceptive
how potent the unhealed wounds
they write history books

an abstract darkness is near, a concrete darkness
division and such pain in the depth of the living
a darkness without perfume but blind screaming
disguised in a blinding light,
so old that it keeps reinventing
the destruction of saturated worlds
the social body can not survive without a heart
without a multiple mind

hands filled with summer  and thoughts with horizon today, flowing by themselves. a sudden burst of joy, amusement in the face of ordinary life, trivial yet so creative beyond our control. the mind contemplating the image of  the situation decided it was funny, it was something else: sitting on a chair in the cold on a busy boulevard waiting for meatballs with mashed potatoes to be ready while reading about how different the thinking of people is in the east compared to the west (the geography of thought) while listening to massive attack and my legs dancing on the pavement while thinking about summer in between the lines while looking after women in the street. me - a surreal collage of actions and thoughts haunted by love as quantum superposition. I wonder where does a thought begin, where does it trully end

mama told me:
minodora, stop thinking about sam
when you go to the market
think of bacon, think of cabbage
be a proper woman
what would have been, i asked her
if beethoven hadn’t always had a bird
singing in his head?
yeah but beethoven, mama said
picking up the dust rag
and starting to clean the genius’s ears
and that’s only because i must
write about you
the same way i must sneeze
or yawn
i dreamt of you last night
you had a baby with a cat’s head
he was cute as a button
you were screaming your head off
‘come see what a tumbling rock
has to go through to reach a beautiful stillness’
it’s a big deal
when you forget to cross yourself
before going to sleep

Nora Iuga translated by Diana Manole and Adam Sorkin

the clockwork reversed
time is joking
some plastic smiles
some scattered dreams
and the growing pains
bending us beneath the horizon
here it is
written in my yesterdays
i wouldn't have loved you
differently
next day

with my childlike defenses
holding together
the shape of the world
inside a bubble
a phantasmatic place
or just a drama
(for mama)
here i am anyway

and the world without us
here it is

again and again
I believe in it
I know it exists
feeding on infinity

if you were a poem
darkness would get deeper and deeper in you
till it turned into white or alkaline nostalgia
it is something only yours, so much laughter
as if life itself was an obsession with a strange pulse

I believe in it
I feel it exists
feeding on flesh and bones
on the cycle of wonder

a quarter of a second
that's all I need to understand
the emotion of spring leaves

maybe the earth knows or
the body knows first
what he or she dares
immersed in sunsets
and adverbs
lions make themselves
prey in blue windows
outside the fle/ash  of words
the verbs of the world
inside a shepherd whistles
a love song
to the sweetness of grass

If only, if only a small red fish would come
  show his golden eyes above the apathetic ocean and ask me
to make three wishes, to have three dreams I can’t come up with one

If only, if only the tides would come, burning
  to wash us off the shore, to take us, wrap us
and bury us like amnesiac seeds in its warm *****, its vast womb

If it came as an enormous face, a shining face
  to look us in the eye, to draw us into its blinding mirror,
to make us press our mouths to its vast lips, and into its huge blue eye
  retreat and rest...

If only, if only something, someone, anything, anyone would come,
    a ray of dark apocalyptic light, an effervescent narcotic toxin,
a new shiver, a new anxiety, a leap into a different world,
    if only there could be another man, another wisdom, a new thought
to think us all          to deliver us from ourselves, to abolish us

and we cease, universe, souls, if only we could endure the birthing pain

to sleep... die... sleep... to rise again into Imagination...

Magda Carneci from *My Cup of Light

there was a time before time or
so it goes that time was full of air and
memory not yet a galaxy of space atoms
the enchanted body had already started dreaming
a time without shape or direction
I was a body without horizon cause my mind
was only a dream in someone else's mind
(-the only route to some truth is through the unknown-
the mind is only an abyss of time in the beginning)

there was a time when only the touch was real,
a space of rapture and dread, of quietness and falling
into the rythms of the air
secretly in the depth of skin, of heart and joints
new sprouts were growing to keep the inside inside
and outside outside
certainty was just the feeling of (in)security inside an endless body
and your time was my time and my time was your time
each second a simetry cause time loved us

now that time creates a new dimension for each direction
I can thank my heart for being in love with the pain of being born  of time

today is a bitter day
words are broken windows
poetry refuses itself

people turn their faces from each other
no crossroads for the wounded
looking for their bodies full of warmth
I am alone with my fragile heart
too many objects of perpendicular desire
and no purpose intrinsic to our birth

it's a normal day
some are sharpening their minds
dress up their desire
to use me

today is just another day
the world is devouring its fragments
in the quietness
of hearts

your touch a bet with intensity
unfathomable
my eyes turned into seeds like
energy turns into matter
the pain and pleasure of words
who cares who is one with whom

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

much to be learned from the edge of dreaming
from the threshold of time about
inaudible histories, leftovers of
the real or imagined
they gave me the demand for truth
the truth they kept hiding inside the lesions of light
and now I have this excess of subjectivity
to confront, to join the dance
one cannot speak about
history remains trapped inside nails
like a circus of hungry ghosts risking
Descartes' error

today is a straightforward day
when the light lends me some essence
the foliage is getting more ardent
the daymon of thought less voracious
the sky is self-contained
this path or that path insists not to leave any trace
inside, today is just another day stolen from the void of mistery
I am wearing all my loves as one in my wrinkles
pneuma stories if you look straight into the rain of photons
and yes, my chest is still the nest of a hurricane

a paradox, perhaps you'd say
imagination frees reality
what if it's the other way round:
reality frees imagination

my lips forget your ironies
waters feel your surrender
the rush hour of something ineffable knows
you are caressing the back of the light
your words are crispy and salty

I emigrate into a silence that keeps its promise
I'll learn your steps like the worm learns the apple
or the sea learns the depth

light learns colour from its carbon dreams

I'm in no hurry,
I'll let time pass by.
Each second as it drops
Bit by bit erodes
Suffering.
I'll be patient.
Each wave that breaks
Is rasp to the rock.
On which I'm bound,
Each speck of rust
Thins the chain.
In just a millennium, or two,
The rock will become sand,
The iron links fine powder,
My bones calcium molecules
Dissolved in water,
Suffering nothing.

By Ana Blandiana, translated by Adam J. Sorkin

My flesh has become a candle
But I am a flame in a transparent sky,
Like dead birds,
I will weigh more than when alive.

The burning eye feeds on wax
and makes a few hot beads drip down
Once I learned to fly, once
I had proof, but I remember having flown.

My whole body is a candle
All will pass into dust in the end
The flame will melt into the blue
And you will feel the burn on your hand.

**Adrian Popescu

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

The ashes of time must fall
somewhere
they fall inside the red
urn of my heart

I must forget I am a poet
this day I am speeding
towards a sure mark

the words I am uttering
are the tears
of the man I was
and died

a devil with
a long tail
is kicking up dust
I can't make out the heavens

Dan Laurentiu, *101 Poems

"Oh, tranquility
Penetrating the very rock,
A cicada's voice."
Matsuo Basho

I was broken, how much do I have to say?
my first taste of the air, a tornado
I wear my mind full of cracks, of strange attractors,
the chaos of the blue lives there,
some collage of potting soil and beauty
my tears are round like an explosion
my hips an extension of tenderness
I was broken beyond despair beyond repair
white birds in my smile going to far away places
in search for their shape
when nobody sees me my hands are full of laughter, of dance, of forgetting, no need to take myself too seriously

I am broken and I like to feel
my fragments caressed by
the morning air, by his sleepy hands,
or the passersby's careless looks

the light the heat
in your eyes*
Peter Gabriel

there is a thunder in your eyes
when wild horses graze in blue quiet sunsets
there is air in your fingertips

I hear
this dance with silence
and how I need to learn
to stay still
in that thunder
in your eyes

as elusive
as unstoppable
as the Heraclitean wave
around a jug
with the dark void at its core

Ioana Ieronim, from *The Lens of a Flame

"Science and art are like arms and heart. So many accidents of meaning, art is in heart, and so is hear, ear, art as a form of heart hearing."
Michael Eigen

I didn't want to open that door
nevertheless life did it for me
residues of this old combustion
pits of rage you're carring
for their perfumed names
humiliation at every corner of the street
suspicion of the sunrise

I remember or maybe I dreamt it
two sons looking for their father
he chose other walls full of zest
holy days were a laughter
indiference for the son rise

how chalenging to be a man hiding vulnerability
there was no one to show you how to
keep the balance of seeing and feeling and forgetting
there was no one to show me my edges
for good Gods to dwell and feast on life unhindered

I am black with love
neither boy nor nightingale
intact as a flower
I yearn without desire.

I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

a raw light today
undecided to retreat its hope
from the mystery of leaves
I'm watching the clouds dissolve
into something larger than themselves
I'm watching my hands, how
their screaming is giving myself to me

the light without name will go its way
so we become waves not deceiving
the sea

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone's a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind

by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger

a world in motion and who would,
who could guess the next rhyme
bliss, hope, and horror
tyrants falling, resisting, raising
fresh terror in sheep's clothing
these are mental wars, fake news tsunamis
feasting in our blood in our sweat in our tension
the invaders possess our minds, our souls
these are reality games, the most dangerous
who cares about facts or consensual reality
humiliation, helplessness, loneliness
manipulated in the transition between nothingness to utopia
an acid destroying the human form and social body
they can feel again after a long apathy the call to heroic action
let's not be afraid, the tyrant is inside and we kind of know it
I look at the face of nothingness, of dread
no power no reason no words
dread is alive too

under the voiceless sky I become
more and more allusive, myself and me
my selves dissolve in hematopoiesis
the economy of loneliness abolished
I want my heart to be a public space
an agora for your dreams or theirs
societal connections make people real
although thinking does hurt, I swear,
but we'll get used to it,
to the incommensurability of Reality

love is a constant state of meeting the other
of meeting ourselves like light meets the grass