An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

from  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

“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

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

When we are
Overwhelmed by fear
And the God at our core
Has left

We become
The shoes waiting
In the chest
Of a
Paralyzed woman.


by Riri Sylvia Manor,
English by Ioana Ieronim
from Poetry and Science
An Anthology of Comtemporary Authors from Romania

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

words come to me from the roots of a resonant hazard
I wonder if we fool ourselves that the future is open
Heisenberg paradox in our eyes, starseeds in yours
billions of years of solitude haunt me
we carry supernova physics in our bodies only they
know what we are attempting, we are crazy
enough to dislocate the inception of language

we should carrefully ponder the meaning of the words
with which we slowly killed our bonds
we should consider the poiesis of living
words have no meaning, only texture

An anxious dress
Like a spring crocus:
Violently violet
Inside and outside.

Its cold silk,
Snake-like and pure,
Born, endured
Like a straightjacket

By my hot sinful
Skin.
Both
Smell of myself;

That is, of life
With death inside.
My soul, living bird,
Can you rend them?

Carolina Ilica, from **The Short Poem of My Long Life

What is Poetry? Who knows?
Not the rose, but the scent of a rose;
Not  a sky, but the light in the sky;
Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly;
Not the sea, but the sound of the sea;
Not myself, but what makes me
See, hear, and feel something that prose
Cannot: and what it is, who knows?

by Eleanor Farjeon

What,
what shall I do with you?
My gipsy, my fix, my oyster, sea —
only a few spiritual members
gather in front of you, speechless:
my eyes, lips, *****, hands…
— And the heart, my love, where is the heart?
Here and here, and there, my love,
in every place
that your lips touch.

Amir Or from *Let's speak you

tanks are marching over my soul
bombs are dynamite for sight
it is unbearable
(if you can't ease)
the pain
the anger
the grief
helplessness and terror
they sculpture our souls
raising citadelles to dwell

I weep words for time not to freeze
it is cruelty that shuts down the mind

countless lives are played at the roulette
the geometry of power is mutilating everything
especially the birth of reality
my fragility like velvet
is soft to touch.
the trajectory of erratic steps,
the fragility and the strength of the world
are visible through bones of glass

hatred is a force that keeps the center spinning,
not turning into a black hole

we are close
the tyrant pushes himself on the brink
the naive world has fortgotten -
tanks are marching over
bodies carrying
the brightest of light -
the event-horizon
of death

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

with carnivorous eyes without a center
he's secretly moulding the void from behind
too many interrupted gestures
he's afraid we're going to laugh at his naked ****
he has sensitive dreams and nervous fingertips
such is the pain not kidding that he starts misspelling
his name
passionate like a colt, like a murderous silence
he doesn't mind he is a fragment
waiting to be taken somewhere
beyond
to an unknown love

today you died one more time
before words -
they dissolve migrant birds,
their shadows carry the sky

it's not enough
you're watching me
with tango movements
my desire, your birth tonight
and the chronicle of a redeemed body

it's you again
drawing my tomorrow uninvited
in this frame of reference
we are not symbiotic lovers
but fearful whispering prayers,
one blank sun,
the remains of a sea,
some irrational numbers...

what is beauty: a naked word
sore chest with wonder
torment-like tension suddenly flooding
soothing radiation within
unborn words
silence

a world reinventing prayer: it is beauty
tearing me down

hands sliding
sounds gliding
minds swirling
in this dance
of stillnes

gaps filled
with
longing
arising
dwelling

I meant to write another poem
but time's corkscrew drills
the ribcage
my dreams are acid
the thought - a decayed staircase
don't know what I want to say
Future seems a forgotten poem
gravitation is not a joke inside the bones
I should have learnt to respect you,
death

somewhere in time everything already written
this marvel how everything meets anything
that belongs to a togetherness of darkness
I've been touched by this easiness of travelling
the path between garden and perfume
I've played the fool who believed images
so ready to commute in an endless still
pursuit of the chimera of truth

you know, there is this hidden dimension where
time and space haven't invented their names yet
cause they annihilate each other endlessly
there is this pain like a worm in an eagle's sight
so sensitive the spring of words
that time touches us with this wonder
a merciful road between chance and necessity

all the hope of a blind dawn in my writing hands
like a morning awaiting its silence
there is nowhere to hide from pain
in the end

my eyes a blue absence memories disguised in tears
I cannot be other but a song, as simple as that
I am you only in the morning, then
I commute the night to the tempo of your steps
you should come with me to the edge of noise
of haze of pearls where all begins with a duchenne smile
I am surrounded by blind walls free only in my sleep
when I fall far away from me in another you
what I say have already been said many times
by candlelight in truth and bone marrow
the fullness of my love too deep for sorrow

you float like an enchanted nebula in my mind,
pass like the clouds inside my veins,
are the easiness of breathing in my dreams
you forget me for millions of seconds in the imaginary time
you are more real than reality itself in your spontaneous combustions
so that I destroy you each day inside my bones,
I ignite the narrative of dawn, the blueness of your ribs
I forget about you like I forget crying in the aliveness of lovers
I need to forget you like one forgets faraway explosions, storms and miracles because I love you with all the songs of the wind,
the wind that spreads the seeds further away from each other the same way the flow of mystery so precise is carring us further and further away towards ourselves

So then, let's take the Foraminifera.
They lived, since they were, and were since they lived.
They did what they could since they were able.
In the plural since the plural,
although each one on its own
small limestone shell.
Time summarized them later
in layers, since layers,
without going into details,
since there's pity in the details.
And so I have before me
two views in one:
a mournful cemetery made
of tiny eternal rests
or,
rising from the sea,
the azure sea, dazzling white cliffs,
cliffs that are here because they are.

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

night comes with waves of perfume
the trance of flowers is quiet and only
the winds can touch the secret of trees, still
sleeping under the apple trees gives one deeper dreams
when darkness hunts me I remember
your empty hands against the form of light
how you struggle to find the archaic tune
the chronicles of the invisible unfolding
my mind recycles thought from sprout to seed
the vesper bell plunges the crickets,
the roundness of the heart deeper
into the hour of the dark

If we do not inhabit our verses,
what is the use of writing?

Eminescu, Rilke, Byron and Mandelstam
succeeded.

Grapes squeezed in a timepress.

If we are not alive in our images
what remains of poets?

Dew and ink,
Labour, symmetries?

Blood is the only colour
That can’t be erased from a book.

Adrian Popescu, from My Cup of Light
translated by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart

Old courtyards with tubs of laundry:
‘Go to the washerwoman and do your own washing’
I whisper to you, and the wild apricot trees
all turn suddenly white, the sky pales,
the world is ****** in a drenching buzz.
There΄s a smell of bluebags and a sulphurous bubbling.
You΄d hardly believe it — so much steam rises
that only dirt is left in the copper.
The wild apricots petrify into coral.
It΄s so easy — easy in a woman΄s way —
to wash your soul, to rejoice in the spring wind
shaking the scales on its dragon-tail
so that you΄re looking at soap-bubbles
it blows for you between your fingers.
Two children pass by, holding on a string
a balloon transparent as a bubble.
For a moment we are crouched inside it.

Grete Tartler

[Translated into English by Fleur Adcock]

New Europe Writers Bucharest Tales, Contemporary Literature Press, Bucharest, 2014

I know this woman well
from the curl of days
each day I write
a love letter to life
I strive to allow anything as
it is unfolds emerges
aliveness deadness blindness
foolishness fright ignite
the gloaming of thought
the expiration date for
the hade of dreams
I welcome every pain with a smile,
white hair and a glass of wine

this kind of love nested
in the voicelessness
of uncanny zoons
hues tunes lagoons
in the silence of soles
when you step so carrefully
not to disturb the unformed truths

pain love, neighbours
in the flow of synonyms
they taught myself to me -
the density of ribs
the depth of skin
the electricity of muscles
the tautology of heart
the logorrhea of thought
the temptation of beauty

moon is to blame
it hid its unforseen tales
inside the blueprints of
songs under the skin

When I was a child,
other children thought
me strange. When they drew
mountains or rivers,
I drew shapes they'd never seen.
I drew whales.

No one from our village
had ever been to the sea.
So when my mother saw
the monsters I drew
she took me on pilgrimage
to Namche.

I was filled with the journey,
until a Lama - a man who knew
the world - told my mother:
"She draws whales because
the sailor reborn in her
still thinks about the sea.

I have seen children come
from high in the mountains,
who draw only pyramids.
And once, when I was a young
disciple in the monastery,
I met a child who drew only
the turtle and the lizard;
he even played a yak's horn
as if it were a didgeridoo. And though
this child was no more than four,
I felt his soul was ancient as dust;
from him I learnt to use
the short time we're given.
But a child like yours,
a child with the sea in her,
she knows the breath of a wave
is the mantra of the land,
and takes the shape life gives her."

"Ah yes", my mother sighed,
"though she holds great life,
she herself needs to be held
like water in my hands."
With that, the holy man
blessed me with sand,
juniper and incense,
to find the earth in me.

And now I'm Lobsang's wife.
Standing at the window,
watching him chop wood,
I carry his child within me.
When I am old
I will tell this child my story:
how I went to Namche;
how, even though a Lama
found the earth in me,
there were times
when oars dipped through the clouds,
when I was the sea
and the moon was my mother watching
through her great whale's eye.

Tony Curtis, Three Songs of Home, The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1998

* the poem was posted with the kind permission of the author

she is so brave so daring
so quiet so earnest
holding the void of pain
for so long
in sleepless nights
she used to wildly dance
her unmuted dreams
such gentle spirit nests
in her heart
that the days count themselves
till darkness subsides
and laughter reinvents itself

her fierce heart is such a gift
the shape of miracle
in my tears
each day

winter slowly digests me
it's hard to process
standing in the spaces
between the void of pain and
the void of ecstasy
(any void is just the unbearability
of fullness)
no violin can invent
some tears
my eyes not split
searching for
a tree-womb
to shelter my skin
and slow my cells
to the decency
of breathing,
to unearth
the old tale
gently
like an offering

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.

“If the perception of reality involves unpleasure, that perception – i.e., the truth – must be sacrificed". S. Freud

silence, this empty space
sight is stumbling on every object emptied of itself
I tend to forget all the nights  turning to dust
all the words turning to rust
we can hardly bear the intensity of paradoxes
I can see the world better through walls of tears

silence, this fullness of time when
the unreal seems so real, like the song of stones
I take back, I own the vision of my skin
grief is an explosive substance
the destruction of words follows
the destruction of mind really

who wants to see "the future of an illusion"?
we are so vulnerable so flawed when it comes
to creating reality, we want to forget all pain
we want to not know
the innocence of apples and oblivion we carry
in our dreams

the breath of history in unknown bodies
intoxicate my sight I might say
it chokes me with a mystified light
I have to learn how to breath my own life
it's easy to confuse the absent with the real
the incorporation of dread, hidden feelings
and unspoken truths a subtle tyranny
no body carried my body in a mind

I want to spend my life writing love stories I will
forget by midnight and rewrite with laughter

between generations a subtle struggle cause there isn't still
enough space inside for the life of one's boundaries
it's either you or me to suffer but everybody is OK
we smile at each other, we appreciate each other

unbearable life colonizes the body with unbearable silence, signs without symbols but symptoms, drives and confiscated stories
unreachable bodies woven together by force in the fabric of illusion
cast a dimming shadow like the melancholy of an echo heard
by no body

we fall, we run, we chase, we hide
make plans and make believes
we force our roots to ignore the cycles of decay
we fill our bodies with rush and dismay
we love and we are ready to die all
the symbolic deaths that ignore the traffic lights
just to just to just to just to
avoid the unbearable pain of being alive

his words have the beauty of sirens
his eyes the depth of a flame
the dawn is unsustainable sometimes
his fingers are looking for the edge of darkness
fragile as a new born thought
his dreams are characters in a play with the invisible
hidden in the stones of the sky, in unwritten books
and unfollowed dialogues is the voice of his time
he struggles with the unseen rule of the world
like a priest without a church
the darkness inside kept in mutable particles

he will unlock one day, all of a sudden, the mistery
of light inside the deepest darkness cause
his feet carry the craft of wisdom

you intensify a subtle creature inside me
with sudden nuances of sonorous blueness, aurora greenness,
naughty yellowness
with the impatience of roots piercing the earth of my soul
this creature keeps stumbling onto the same truth that
metabolizes light tenderly for me to have a measure of my depth
suddenly the strangest of strangers is I

my lips feel ****
I a bit vile
I feel decisive
tonight
I'm burning down
the my oh my
Van Gogh's turquoise
inside
self portrait in the wild:
a woman loves to
toast to cloudburst

I think I might
recycle the devil
for poetry's sake,
tonight it smells
of cinnamon,
of flemish paintings

"Poetry is not a luxury... Through poetry we give name to those ideas which are until the poem nameless and formless."

by Audre Lorde

To live well and to die well is the same task.
Epicurus

the song of the old rusty swing
like a frozen pane
(somewhere in a passing memory)
not knowing if there can be
such thing as genuine trust,
you wait for transparent nights
amid angst,
the turmoil of words, rushing gestures,
tired patterns
suffocating all
clairvoyance
you wake up from the lethargy of dreams
to the cruelty of life devoid
of connection
a door got jammed

your parents and their distant lives
-their past is your future-
carrying their never ending childhood
like a message in a bottle
the contraction of days bears you the same
the taste of death is just a habit now
no safeguard
you whisper your dreams to the ragged baby doll -
“Bebe” is here for you
You’re the pain taster
forcing dangerous juxtapositions
or the silent screaming melodies
abundant in misattunement
while mother flashes her cracked smile
on empty days
it might have been better to swallow
her thoughts
while father has a croaked ambition
never to rest
translating his will of power

the promise of tomorrow
left you unscathed
slipping out of time
needs practice,
a neat forehead,
to bear in mind that
light holds on to uncertainty
every time you fall

last mile home is the hardest

this animal is my self
it demands care, quietness, aliveness
infused as it is with primordial light and dread
sometimes I am only ears and eyes and fingers
and legs and *** and spine, a stomach, a liver and
a heart, sweat, tension and craving, a felt unity
vital stories to be told in the forgotten language
of hope and despair, longing and refusal
there is earth in my hands, air in my eyes, fire
in my stomach, water in my skin
untranslatable whispers about you, the other-me
I am a thirsty boundary for the river of life to dream
sighs symbols rythms harmonies and virtues

The true poem is not the work of the individual artist, it is the universe itself, the one work of art which is forever perfecting itself.

Ernst Cassirer, from "An essay on Man"

there are places where no mind
can reach
as far as the gate of winds

I'm counting hours, counting stars
burdened with the exhaustion of difference

see the hand write of time in my silent steps
black wholes in between my thoughts

I can smile, I am in the present tense of home

there are no attributes
in the centre
no spin into the crucifixion of the day

only the tenderness
of the sinking sun

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
?

sit down beside me for a while
even if it hurts
there are packs of stray dogs in my mother's smile
nothing's gonna hurt my father's fists
darkness comes with soft paws and no affection after ******
they refused their bodies such
that I had to not lose sight of the corpse of morning
I caught my eyes simply falling
waiting for the birds of prey
to tell their truth in our cage
what does it mean, you know, to have a soul

sit down beside me for a while
in this impossibly empty room
our flesh needs words

In a room among newspapers from far-away climes
like a tame animal like a marvelous man you love yourself
                                                        ­ and sit on the edge
     of the bed with your palms on your knees
or absolved of birth and death you stroke your pumice-stone
                                                    ­                                              cheek
until the sun crosses the other side
next to the photograph of the happy child who is piddling on
                                                              ­                           a blue shore
Then every thing returns regroups
as though in a boiling fog in which things are mended
among the obscure plantations of chance And alongside
a woman carefully hangs out the clothes of the drowned lover and
                                                             ­                             speaks to them
the one who still seeks you in the black bones of the
                                                             ­                                   butterflies
And while you wander lost through the mists of a powerful
                                                        ­                                         manhood
past the spades left on the fresh molehill
or gaze at the swaying of the two stakes ****** into the shore
or lie down on the ground and the wind covers your face with
                                            thistles brought who knows whence
a great sadness brings back the lunar landscape of her tired
                                                                ­                            shoulders
and there are no more words but her whisper are things which
                                                                ­                                        settle
everywhere filling the ripped silence of the train's screech
her whispers are the water gathered over the prints of her
                                                                ­                  soles after the last rain
but a simple turn of the key is enough for you to be able to hear
the slow flowing of time by your dampened socks
or the heavy breathing of the roots
and again you dream the blue shore  at the end of the river
on which we ruminate our enchanted abandonment

Gellu Naum, Vasco da Gama and other pohems, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2007

"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

"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

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

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

so long  so painful this journey
to surrender myself anew like a bud full of tension
recognize you, reinvent the rituals of sensing
I weep in front of the threshold of spring  
between eros and thanatos an excessive tenderness
I am well prepaired for the erosion of time in my hair
poetry and reality facing each other in my hands
I do not hope do not despair do not wait for grapes to wonder
it's just the taste of it,  the feel of it, this quality of the infinite
that makes me look at you with androgynous complicity

I'm here. These texts these sacred carnivorous words
this verbal membrane
(read carefully I summon you read twice!) :
curtain meninx electroshock therapy
blanket straitjacket
bed-sheet ***** placenta

I praise this osmotic verbal membrane
I give you I get undressed I curse myself
Ah! my repressed whorish pathos:
I give you lucidly
Any poetic art is written in ink
(I calmly assure  in public)
in fact
in these mortal neurons

Darkness and dust

These texts these words I've picked from books and streets
Only this ultimate membrane
(precious like the *****
fragile like soap bubbles)
still separates me
from the psychic space where you've pushed me
                                             as towards the springs of the Nile
from the psychic place whence  I try - cautiously
painfully - to pull out:
my hands my paws my brain my heart
What is beyond? darkness and dust
What is left? a poetic art this darkness this dust
these cracking neurons

Marta Petreu
*translated by Liviu Bleoca

I can hardly bear this
tension of my lips
as I fall for the silence
in your hands
I remain silent till
the coffe gets cold
the streets get slippery
because of a radical darkness
somewhere there is a first
breath, a first kiss,
a last breath

I want to forget all languages
except the language of whispers
a rumbling cascade this feeling
of my quiet fingers
such a wonderful paradox
within a broken world
innocent dreams can envision
you

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a greeen girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the **** wonder of it.