Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

By Czeslaw Milosz

I'm passing through an autumn day
As through an enormous tear.
A fruit full ripe with perfume sweet
Sinks slowly slowly  to my feet.

I'm passing through the wind and light.
I've never known the reason why
Seasons gone remain as branches
In those unclaimed yet by the night.

Emil Brumaru
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Sergiu Celac

A night is born
full of false holes
dead sounds
like the corks
of nets trailed in the water.

Your hands bring a breath
of inviolable distances
as elusive as ideas.

And the ambiguous sway
of the moon, of the gentlest,
if you rest your eyes on me,
touches the spirit.

You’re the woman who passes by
like a leaf.

And bequeaths an autumn flame to the trees.

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the *** of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time

It is time

by Paul Celan

can’t speak about you in words but
in the heaviness of trees on unrelated stones
or all the things I didn’t chew
the worm of history froze silent
no axis mundi in my blood but
dysmorphic dreams
your rancid placenta

I can’t speak while
you spin around on streets smelling of flesh
and the layers of time squeeze all the screams of me

mother: the furthest language

Innocent mother,
Like a tree you brought me forth,
When you were praying for pardon
                                                   on your knees,
When unquenched fires were burning you
And the strands of life bound you
                                                    more tightly.

I was neither for you
                                         peace,
Nor the olive bough,
Nor against pain --
Sweet unbinding.
I did not understand how to bring wise answers,
Nails I nailed
                           into your palms, on the cross.

Blameless mother,
Passing mother,
Pallid light,
The thought pains me badly
And time does not give me relief.

Flavia Cosma from *Wormwood Wine

in the middle of seeing islands of fog
the roots disconnected fom the branches of thought
was it like this: you do not deserve to be
the vitality of forms, do not exist
we were told while breathing
do not exist in your bodies do not exist in your minds some dreams are just silly
dumb as that daylight
throats are full of words of unshed thinking
of noise so loud that the world might have imploded
dark circles of impossible pain contain our ribs
why are you here you were told, we don't want you
we  can not witness the joy of life with our teeth full of something we don't understand
our eyes are holding the light captive
like a knife full of strife
why are we here why
the fog obscures the echo
why are we here why

closer to the edge
you've never found nakedness
the taste of mirrors
-some turn on the radio-
we need a place full of
not the wrong side of hell
it's years now, it's in vain
to measure the route of light
to the other side of truth

innocent apples have ripened
and you keep excavating time
(love is not enough)

have a taste
there was honesty
in bloom

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

beauty! what a soothing tension
inside the nebula
crammed with vibrant darkness.
signified incessant, lurid
imaginary signifier chasing,
irrational  lightning,
unnamed gods dwelling.

there is suffering imprisoned
in the color of your flesh,
there's false emptiness
inside hurricane’s obsessions
such  frightened taste
in your lipstick

Yes, that is precisely where
beauty holds on to itself,
you just have to feel
its traces
in your tears,
in your fears
of being
so alive

your trainers full of dirt
next to a Christmas decoration,
the woodpacker self-absorbed on a branch,
a pigeon floating on a current of mystery
I emptied of an I in the tenderness
of this fleeting moment

familiar this bubble of emptiness
comfortable as a womb
pain plays hide and seek
my hands are free to write
this hybrid creature that is me
fantasy and reality share a reciprocity
I am metabolized by my dreams and so I become
the aperture of the heart open as ever
to catch the murmuration of silence
of longing and forgetting
circles inside echoes inside circles

we didn't invent love
love invented us

I like to stroke your hair
till my hands get electric
free in between the echoes, desires
your touch so easy that
I start biting all the half truths
and stop dreaming about the other side
of the moon
your hot soles without breaks:
I feel like a woman
blessed with
love-days

the light is so tenderly intense  after the storm,
it fills the dark shapes in between my thoughts &
I feel like playing the squiggle game with your name:
one day you might be Isidor who feels the skin of the air
some days you are Yuriy the great with skyscrapper dreams
what about Luis with soft hands tomorrow?
or Tiago, the tamer of the beast of thought?
I have to mention Maksim too, for maximum of delight in your sight
oh, Alfeu for the images of the unseen passing through you quietly in your sleep, like cosmic rays
Liberio I'll call you for the day of the freedom of speech,
once you've discovered the layers of nothingness
or Noah, the new born into a fresh laughter

out of the blue
my hands turn into themselves
and so does the dust of leaves feeding
the soil of a mysterious skin
we are passengers through blissful omens
cruel visions of a ravished anti-time
so treat me like fire

I don't believe that you will die
I believe that you will turn
into a night bird
an Athenian owl

a night bird
that chirps in my ear
who are you
where do you come from
where are you going

Dan Laurentiu, *Mountolive

keep on pushing Push the sky away*
Nick Cave & The Bed Seeds

reality is patched
with evolving truths
waning and waxing
between love and hate

if only the trees would know
how hard can it be…
to live in the shadow of the other
with this infinite desire

What do my bones know
about the longing for eternity?
what becomes of truth
if you cannot recognize the simplicity of freedom
in our lungs?
What about the liberty of life
to feed its own destruction?

There is violence in an unknown god’s plans
There is mercy
if you still find a beating heart
in the contractions of pain
and then there may be hope
for some freedom -
to be or not to be
(growing, learning, loving, hating, stepping back,
stepping forward, you please fill in the blanks)

Only together we can bear the sky
we should learn from the woods
how to love the human form
Undivine

In the spaces silent with possibilities
there is contact there is emptiness
“like fire, like panic, like love,
like water, like revolt”

Meteorites are passing following their love
we know we are beautiful when we are alive

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

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

longing creates canyons
a row of well behaved days
a new physiognomy for metaphors
the night has paused
no semiotic skin between me and my lover
ecoutez-moi
listen to the spaceless desire
this woman lost in me
my womb chimes, utopia
Unlimited

my shoulders were so tired
of carrying this meaning without meaning
I’ve done my negotiations with reality –
to handle the truth that I cannot exist in your eyes
but in your absence I invented the world

you’re the creator of this empty space, so central
of restless nights, of desperate sighs
making a secret pact with the Danaids, my days
my love for you only sealed the invisible dimension
against all odds
I’ve worked like a smith at this smitten dream of love
but you’ve erected walls inside, walls of silence outside
Yours was the impossible touch
I would know your belts better than your hand
no room for dreams at your table
only your fist in the arena of power
between the kitchen and the living room

you’ve stayed so loyal to her rejecting womb
that all women should have been born as men, soldiers
but there she was, this little girl, chasing you in my dreams
how clever should I have been to get your attention?
how sensitive could I have been to translate your silence?
you’ve turned me into a sleepless tigress weighing the danger
of every move in the corner of your eye

I’ve rarely put on lipstick
my eyes were all too busy protecting
your crushing absence,
too much life compensating inside
all those tears still dissolve my face
with every imaginary man
again and again
I’ve studied  pigeons’ flight
instead of the art of flirting in/with the night
I’ve searched for wounds to heal instead
of blissful laughter, not to disturb
the stillness of the forbidden one

I’ve carried your pride for so long
incongruent with my own sense of value
a nothing left outside, a sign without meaning
I was
counting the pathologies of day

but I’ve signed the declaration of independence
don’t want to take the art of losing to perfection
You were so right to hide, to yell and to pretend
dreams are the hardest thing to handle
I’ve stretched my soul on height and depth
that it’s become a fluid full,
emptied of myself

I will always love you
with a wiped smile
Father,
the future remains unwritten
inconnu

"De mi-ai face tu inima punte, sa te intampin mereu."*

here, distracted by seagulls
I have dreams interrupted by gravity
you are painting the moon in my hair
I would like to open my eyes
to say something
but I am already taken to you in all languages
between the lines only empty spaces
I still haven't figured it out
why you split the page in two
don't want to hear the dying time
you are painting my red red heart
naked
I want to kiss your fingers,
your tired shoulders
in solid mornings
the way you stepped/screamed/exploded inside
my skin your umbrella against the void
they cannot convince me of anything
the night cannot erase
the freedom of light
in Turner's eye

somewhere beyond the hip of night
I'm waiting for something by the sea
but what it is
it's a mystery carried by seagulls
so far away
that far away
from me

There were tears of joy
There was a misunderstanding
implicitly (who was being born there?)
oh no, a simplicity...
There I was at the fount of milk
A strange woman with arms full
and red  screaming thighs
No need of words
just the heaviness of the breast

First smile, first migration of the soul
in the tearful land
of a new happiness
My baby’s laughter
unriddles the future
of my tender hands

“What is time, mama?”
“Just a circling seed, my child”
“Oh, mama, time is a wheel!”
“What is hope, mama?”
“Hope is a fly catcher, my child,
  a migrant bird.”

Such is happiness
undiluted
the mercy and gratitude of time
in my hardwood
love

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

Why hiding your fears in an unchewed No
Or sparkling your eyes just one liquid moment?
We are already tired before we begin.

En passant I have to tell you about the glue
That is cast upon our hips
scattered images in fugitive dreams
us at the same table
me waving good bye
perfume on your hands
but not enough laughter
to open some space in time

It’s noon and I miss you

as I am trying to learn as much as I can
from the self of trees, wind, of bees and birds
of the unlanguaged child I still am, from
wise men and women through the arch of time
I am well aware that we can keep each other captive
inside the machinery of make-believe that makes lonely
bodies & sunsets bearable
I can't help feeling I am just this,
a vagabond in such a deep mystery

yeah, the sun, the moon,
the craving, the coffee in the morning,
thesis, antithesis, synthesis
the old dream out in the open
and the girl who doesn't say "I love you"

she's whispered in the mist
of unknown cities
devoted
en pathos
(like the priestesses of the old temples)
young horses measuring the
silence between words
hello, says the devil

and the sun and the moon,
the craving follow unknown routes
she's having her coffee black
in an imaginary morning
holding the synthesis of "I do"&"I don't"
(love you fiercely)

her shadow is passing
with the wind
between memories
chasing the shape of
tomorrow

you are a stranger, I keep forgetting

forgetting that with you
I do not speak my mother tongue

what do they call it
when we reach toward one another
across the contorted mirror of our senses
and your glance teaches me
that this is the way

what we say seems to relapse into roots
down
down to the seabed that became
a land of many flocks and pastures

and now
here you are
Stranger

caged wings beat in my body
which remembers these things

remembers its winged lightness
of the beginning

when it was promise

when it was
word

Ioana Ieronim, from *Ariadne's Veil

Learning the way out.
in between feels like forever
you're darkyears away,
the antimatter
of vicarious personhood.

days crumble upside down
the pain had you butchered
only sparrows forget their stories in the sunset.

the mute carpets keep you company
still life with despair and an apple.
Jesus promised something
-undeciphered-
look at this fallen demigod
you’re a pile of fears
drying in the sun
and the night has no (w)holes to hide
a stuffed puppet
the true form -
unrecognized.

pain is almost a character
roaming inside
tramping blindly the remains of the day
making everything so sharp alive,
look
each cell  has a voice
and you can’t open your eyes:
no space, no name
just a rotten apple
left over from yesterday.
no one came on the mute carpets
and the silence holds on
like a ghost of the future

language gets killed
yet the heartbeats
march  on

this endless procession of luminous shapes of darknes,
of blindind lights full of dark stories passing through
everything my mind can envision
thoughts slowly growing like trees with imaginary roots
to dygest to recycle the unbearably bearable
a true psychic cosmology cause life creates
by destroying, destroys by creating
I need to examine my dreams, not the alphabet of dreaming
-symbolic transformation, not equation-
the terror to be so alive in an unresponsive world
it is pain that turns my thoughts into wax figures
I want to deny that words have a heart of stone cause they might deny their nature
in the beginning was the word, or the emotional field, the primeval soup of vibrations
you are not what you know, you are not what you perceive, you are the one to be felt and let go of
we are all that is unbearably bearable

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

what she said about
all her loves and
the fountain of sleep
the spring of thirst
have just showed me
this resonant truth
like an oracle
I am still trapped
in this echo: that
I am as mad as
I've always been
maybe even worse
cause now I can see
the stars and the voids
in plain daylight
and I want to say
with all my waters
with all my earths
with all my deaths
with all my fallings
into the sky

Frida said
come what may
I wonder if she feared
the bloodflood

the streets are full of hours
the hours filled with a labyrinth song
our faces risk a strange engulfing
we are so benevolent with lying to ourselves
my love has a dervish spin,
my mind is on a nightwatch
down the rabbit hole
so loud the world its disparate pulses,
unbearable conundrums

we should learn more from tears
what if my love is the worm
inside the apple
what if your love is oblivious
like an empty womb

all I have is this feeling
like a spine. of course
certainty is not in fact possible
especially on untouched
lips

there is so much night fallen under, in between, beside
the space is not enough to handle the burden of the living
the music refuse to surrender, grotesque
to givedeathsomethingtodo
each tiny thought fills the chamber of not-yet-thoughts
toomuchtobear
each idea splits into thousand others each minute
the mind is a rag, a broken doll watching this performance of power
l’elan vital
feelings ceaselessly running wild into each other,
crashing, colliding, stumbling blinded
calling their names
no redemption for light anywhere
crawling happens in all direction in the same time
until space it’s collapsing under its own weight
I slip through a dark visible hole attuned to the rhythm of hell
what an experience, the speed of blood refuses to freeze
terror is running to stand still
not enough connections
I practice some claws out of chaos
crammed with ******
the pain is unbearable all over
every inch is a battlefield
time has turned into the ghost of eternity
just a direction to flow, if only I could find
sing me a lullaby mama
so that I can make more space between my ears
lend me some grace
to ask death
to be gentle with me
only imagination breathes in
to steal some time alive
dreaming the touch of peacefulness
amid the stubbornness of heart

nospacenolight
this is how I became an expert
in pigeon’s flight
while insisting somehow
to keep my eyes inside
this is how I got some courage
to bear Yes & No in the dark
to keep writing when I die in myself
for love to find

I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
And who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a counduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.

by Charif Shanahan

forests remain, farther and farther away from us.

only streets, houses
accompany me
like a fingernail on an exhausted hand
wherever i might stop, everywhere,
pain is my compass

always, along this way

forever unwalked
given back to me

the scent of roses in the garden
the waters flooded long ago, belated
tenderness, time
besieged by
time

everything goes by so easily.
life. so easily
was i
forgotten

Andrei Zanca  from *My Cup of Light

"Here comes the shame."

don't bury me inside your distorted womb
don't leave me outside
to watch the ebb and flood of it
they've stolen everything for me
I was there first, your womb is mine
I dare face the sludgy mornings as you like it
I'm on this vigil: seize the women-wombs
maybe some day I'll be able to honestly
forgive my grunge fists
push, smash, kick the terrible fortress
each of them: you've expunged me
I had to **** the dawn for me
to keep you alive
keep smiling obliterating
the fresh growling
keep myself busy with fear
for you to have clean sheets
in the long winter nights
I'll take it down on you:
look at these secret men

what I cannot feel doesn't exist
they don't exist when I frown my lips
your fat womb doesn't exist
when I grind my teeth

only her can send you under
way behind you
naked

"Daddy! Look at me! Grrr!"
I'll get even
look at them:
unrecognized cocoon-women

only them can pull you under
far behind the level of the seed

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

"The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity."

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

In the depths of the bloodied waters
stones were dissolving -
via an echo the wind was telling me,
the rain brought back to my hearing
rhythms of an ancestor song
with one ear stalking the other
I was beginning already to be divided

monologizing - dialogizing
let us go to sleep maybe the reality
we lost will come to us in a dream

the coldness which came from a misunderstanding
had a touch of nobility
then out of pride came scorn
then hate, then we came
to inhabit the same body
like two convicts in one cell
who are fighting underhand
but suddenly stop when they hear
the warden's step

I am myself scarred on the inside
and have no right to pronounce harmony
between you
but take out the ashes while there is time
give the spirit shape

Ioanid Romanescu, from *Time's Expansion

"In paradise the work week is thirty hours
salaries are higher prices always dropping
physical labor is not tiring (because of lower gravity)
chopping wood is like typing
the social system is stable the government moderate
it's certainly better in paradise than in any country

At first it was supposed to be different
luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction
but one couldn't separate body from soul
precisely enough and the soul would arrive
with a drop of blubber a thread of muscle
one had to compromise
mix the grain of the absolute with the grain of clay
still another falling away from the doctrine the ultimate one
only John foresaw it: the resurrection of the body

God is seen by few
exists only for those made of pure pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about floods and miracles
in time all will see God
when this is to take place nobody knows

In the meantime Saturday at noon
the sirens roar sweetly
and heavenly proletarians come out of the factories
carrying their wings awkwardly like violins"

Zbigniew Herbert
translated by Oriana Ivy

share
my last cup of light
before we both
grow blank and
white

Lidia Vianu, from My Cup of Light, Anthology of Romanian Poetry

far away seems so close in your eyes
and you push your blood away to
feed the wind or some whispers
unimaginable to the full
my torrid eyes see the sky full of scars
sometimes when
the moon is full of boom
all I feel is you

the sea of sleep was shivering the other day
today the clouds are in a rush towards the freedom
of the leaves perhaps, and I don't need to know anything about love
cause I can feel it silently labouring, growing more space for sight might light night for despite and ignite for dynamite and satisfied
the child, the lover, the warrior, the go-getter, the wise and the fool
the vulnerable, the humiliated and the daring, the dreamer
they need to talk to each other like the winds talk to the roots

is this all one can give to another, the patience of the flow,
and nothing more  more space to be
is it the echo of your bones that I can't left behind?

next to you
the knot of my hands suffer
from the ermetism of dawn
they can be no more than they are
I download fresh dreams
into breathing
it's hard to leave the bed
puzzled by perfume & body fluids

you have some sour cherries smile
left on the pillow
be the one
that easy -
like a premeditated sonata

next to you
Love is enough

We are the night ocean filled
With glints of light. We are the space
Between the fish and the moon,
While we sit here together.

the dawn collapses sometimes under its own weight while
worlds of gestures are well preserved under the eyelids,
hardly random grammars, addiction to illusions,
the space of grace, the space for violence misued
muted tempos in the fragility of thoughts
we know many words but not the right language to talk to each other,
the vocabulary of hurt exploded inside narrow spaces,  the temple of skin empty
recycle bins full of our selves
we confuse the world with the contours of our pain

untitled the day sometimes
when love has left behind the birth of language

neon birds above
plastic souls beneath
I have no choice
but to feed my soul
with the secret of trees

I still dream
in the skin of the rain
I write with my eyes
poems of touch

This summer I chased
perseids
again
I tried to forget all about
this age of anxiety,
or about the eyes with no echo

For a moment I let reality crash
like cloud castles
and
neon birds spring above
my tired city

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

pillars of darkness are full of debris
suspended in silence
as inside so outside
one day everything is transparent
the angel of apocalypse seized the window of opportunity
the meaning is locked in the semiotic circle
I and non-I mutually annihilating each other
terror breathed in normally
psychic ***** killing biology
the impossible unreachable pain
the mute rage
the lost connection between heart and heart

so powerful and meaningless from above
so small down there
all those little roads
men like ants, bugs, worms
all those petty little lives

to be above, to disconnect from this void
from the taste of earth in the mouth

frozen semiosis
things are sick of meaning
interchangeable
murderers can be heroes, devotees
dreamers

let us weep, let us pray
that we never forget
how the heart knows to play
the chords of day