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

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

In my house, the sunlight inhabits all the rooms,
which makes me think that I am someone important.
At the window, I fall into the slumber
of the nonbeing of everything I see.

I have only the sunlight on my face and arms. I am sad,
like a man who never leaves his house,
yet knows we live in a world of stones and trees
and has no use for the hastened moves
we call friendship.

by Constantin Abaluta, from It Might Take Me Years, An Anthology of Poetry

this pain in the middle
spinning, dividing, spinning
there are two points of him

he howls in my dreams
with cold hands in transcendental spaces
like a long absence in an imaginary present

his eyes - two black boxes
recording all the right data
everything more real than necessary
performing the body with toast sensations

he pauses naturally in the dark room
the man with the moon
swallowed
in his heart

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

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its
Own Vortex, and when once a traveller thro' Eternity
Has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll back behind
His path, into a globe itself infolding like a sun,
Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth,
Or like a human form, a friend with whom he liv'd benevolent.
As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing
Its vortex, and the north & south with all their starry host,
Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding
His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square,
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the moony shade.
Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and the earth
A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity.

from The Illuminated Prophetic Books  **Milton

"Ah! descendons
Ensemble!"*

suddenly the night moved
and I woke up to see him
sitting there in the steamy windows
with his powerless hands

his soul was flickering
screaming inside in every
possible way
his hands had done too much
if only he hadn't desired such
till she told him:
"you are filth
you make me sick
you are a disgrace!!!"

"you are the very fiend",
said the liquor
"I'll **** them all,
I'll **** this turbid full,
I am the devil himself",
said the grin

I saw him in the doorway
leaving behind his empty chairs
he would have strangled her perhaps
next he was lying there
like a pile of rags

"What do I have to lose?"
his death was as respectable
as the one of a king
in a Shakespeare play
it was a double ******
and a suicide
then there was this bond
mother and daughter
had lost their hands
trying  or perhaps failing
to hold

there is such lightness in this
-impossible words-
going back to the unknown
into the ancient sparkle of desire
into the restlessness of oblivion
I woke up and there were some whispers
while I was listening to dawn
or maybe I was finally falling asleep in myself:
when laughter and tears come
just let them be
there is no right or wrong
in eternity

Too many days come seek their past within me
I reach out my hand towards your face and it draws back.
I reach out my hand towards your heart and it stops.
I mustn't speak.
Who knows what secret code
what signals meant for death
I might disclose.

And your face.
And the vision of this hand.
And the way you're removing yourself.
And the image -
vertical as a scream.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

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"

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them -

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do.

that moment of terrifiying beauty
for which there is no language
only a foam of primordial letters
and the possibility of cosmos

the hours cascading in his veins
it was so natural and shocking:
he was my hidden black whole
(the black whole one thought crosses to another)
and with my bare feet on the blade of the horizon
I was bleeding curses
promises to the unknown
confessions of sublime intensity

the terror of beauty so real
as we danced that mysterious dance
of light turning effortlessly into darkness
of darkness turning effortlessly into
light

it all starts in pieces
maybe I was his morphine
and he was rebelling against
every fragment of unhealed time
in his shoulders.
with him I discovered a new sea of time and
fused with my roots
I rest suspended in the chaos of possibility
to the end of my undreamed dreams
as he was hallucinating my younger selves
anew

we opened the other dimensions of time
descended into flesh
without really knowing
how coherent pain can be
and I could go on and on and on, like the beat
we were only a poem
without destination
but the possibility
of cosmos

Go into the woods
and tell your story
to the trees.
They are wise
standing in their folds of silence
among white crystals of rock
and dying limbs.
And they have time.
Time for the swaying of leaves,
the floating down,
the dust.
They have time for gathering
and holding the earth about their feet.
Do this.
It is something I have learned.
How they will bend down to you
softly.
They will bend down to you
and listen.

Laura Foley, from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

"Like a black leukemia of stars"
my soul turns in on itself
far more lonely, far more sickly in spirit.

Above, the same desolate landscape
of your dark isolation,
and below - blacker landscapes of black!

Neither the far-off cry of love
nor the nostalgic come-hither of death
disturbs anything within me any longer.

... And only the relentless light ray of lucidity
stabs through, colder, even colder, without mercy
without doubt, without hope, without even a shiver!

Nichita Danilov
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cirstea

where the eye understands the light &
the thought is not a forbidden zone
the sand is blue, the escape slow
into quietude

there we discover that
the tears have their own dying
dreams are not birds without sky
the prayers of the earth are heard by the trees

when I take you inside my temples
there the blood boils like a secret
from the depth of the moon

I could end where you begin
Kerala Dust

some mornings there is a dawn in me
and there I begin, I look at things
and they don't look back
I rehearse your name with different whispers as if
I rehearse the pulse or a pirouette of silence
You give birth to I, I give birth to you, a strange happening
some mornings  I disappear into a satin breeze that carries my almost thoughts
that's how I call your name, my almost thought, only the body knows
there is a fresh dawn and there I begin

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.

somehow
you accelerate me
to the heat
of ripe apples,
to a brand new smile,
to the pressure of an ocean
in my veins,
to this raw primordial dance
-when you run I follow
when I stay you pray-
to the purity of a winter’s day
naked of illusion

somehow I let you in
ravished by white pigeons
drawing ineffable circles
in the depth of a sky

there is light in this silence:
you accelerate me
beyond myself
and I could die
like a woman

there was a time when
I used to love your shadow
even in my dreams
and daylight was a blessing
cause I caught your screams
incubating in my left shoulder
beyond the doors
much was still possible
-sexus plexus nexus-
in the trenches where
your silence had died

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.

They dug and they dug, so their day
went by for them, their night. And they did not praise
          God
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
thought up for themselves no language,
They dug.

There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.

O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.

by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger

This hospital has a room

for weeping. It has no crèche.
No canteen. No washroom queue.

Only this queue for weeping.
No lost property booth. No

complaints department. Or
reception. No office of second

opinion. Of second chances. Its sons
and daughters die with surprise

in their faces. But mothers
must not cry before them. There is

a room for weeping. How hard
the staff are trying. Sometimes

they use the room themselves. They
must hose it out each evening.

The State is watching. They made
this room for weeping. No remission ―

no quick fixes. A father wonders
if his boy is sleeping. A mother

rakes her soul for healing. Neighbours
in the corridor ― one is screaming

It moved from your child to mine.
More come. Until the linoleum

blurs with tears and the walls
are heaving. Until the place can’t

catch its breath ― sour breath
of pine. And at its heart

this room.

Mario Petrucci, from *Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl

"Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the
       mania
   Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way. "

Friedrich Holderlin
translated by Michael Hamburger

Blue nothing. She considered miles
out the high window in the stairwell.
First, simple paper distances her finger

could trace, point A to point B.
Then the more difficult measurement,
that of closeness, like bonded atoms.

And then, hypothetical expanses
like those of the heart's vessels -
their length could circle the globe twice.

A plane seemed to crawl across the glass,
leaving a necklace vapor trail. She believed
in possibilities, that every atom that could exist,

already did, but still, she could not wear the red,
strapless dress she no longer owned,
couldn't lift her hair for his fingertips to clasp

pearls at the nape of her neck, his breath
fastening a shiver between her shoulder blades
down the small dip of her back.

She wanted to look into a large aperture
telescope, to view the farthest reaches
of visible space, where no energy had ever been

destroyed, to see into the incalculable vastness
of him in their living room downstairs, him
on the brown sofa reading. She wanted

him to put down his book, to think of her
on the landing, waiting. For him to move
exponentially faster, up the stairs two at a time.

by Jo Brachman

the sea fills me up till there is no more space for dying
thoughts turn themselves into a boundless edge
the wind tells me there is only wonder
seashells have forgotten the stories of the depth
my hands want  to rediscover their dreaming
wild birds try the geometry of the sky
and whispers they become

more than a meter away,
I sense the light as if it were a foreign
and endangered thing,
flesh over flesh in flesh under flesh,

and I think that it is only now that I begin to see it well,
only now is it binding as well as it should be,
a matter thicker than metal and heavier than water,
otherwise how could it sink to such great depths?

but what eye clearer than mine sees the light in itself,
with its black veins ready to burst,
darker than a placenta thrown in the garbage,
heavier than mercury when it explodes
and upon seeing it, what eyes will rotate
around it as if around an asphalt bucket?

with an eye such as mine you can’t see the light burning
instead you see its shabby structure,
its weight heavier than that of darkness.
only through the blind and useless eye, you see the unseen light,
the light which rots on Sundays in the yards,
too tired to go away,

the tiny wiry eye flowing after the light
sees what the seeing eye has never seen,
it’s not the matter which is heavy, but the light pressing it,
the eyes that break down are the only ones to see it,
who only sees the light does not see it.

yet who does not see it gathers it in big barrels,
over which they place burdock and stones
and keep it over the years, until it accumulates at the bottom
and hardens like rosin.
one day, in the astronomers’ telescopes
it will look like a dark and thick oil,
which they will use to rub their bodies.

and maybe then the eye, which only brings
bad luck to sight, will disappear.
when he sees with the skin, man will no longer be man
and the religion of retina will have long disappeared.
as long as god exists, he can’t be seen with sight
but then he won’t get away from us anymore.

he is part of the light that
the usual eye can’t see,
yet which my almost blind eyes sees.
from light upwards, things become harder and harder
and while you go up, you can’t go down anymore.
the great difficulty is in fact the easiness,
upon rising, you become the heaviness of the other world,
you crash in nothingness like a bag full of boulders.

man becomes heavy in the other world
because of the light: the venous light
the great luminous Carpathians from under the chest,
the sombre lights which thicken his bones.
who said man is not light?
truly man is light in the unseen,
a clot of lights, very weak ones.
few will be the things which
we haven’t seen because of the light,
this is only because light does not help us see
and anyway I have a bad eyesight
and through my limited glasses
I rather see the unluminous light.
and when the flesh will turn blind, they will also see
the fleshy light because of which we rot.

Ioan Es. Pop
translated by Flavia Hemcinschi

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

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

We came here to fly
in the height of our breath
don’t let the plight block the sun
I listened to my hands till silence came
staccato in my words
your flight is my sea of stories

I settle not into sight
tomorrow is a palimpsest
with its wise owls, the birds of fear
while sensuality is pouring down the windows
like rain in December
and there is something breathing,
a self-absorbed flower of flesh
and the tenderness of someone
to carry the “winelight”
for the flamingo me

your lips taste like morning.
I am redrawing  the horizon inside
for you to bring your pulse
in flight in case you might

What if love was invented by mothers?
I have to ask

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

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

They’ve brought me a shell.

It sings inside
a sea on a map.
My heart
fills up with water
with a little fish
shadow & silver.

They’ve brought me a shell.

**Federico Garcia Lorca

they were deep like roses. like leaves*
the thought is blowing them away. remember
how much death we are capable of
and how much earth there is in the sky.

bu they are deep like roses in autumn.
the leaf of the hands sighs as it falls
like a bird on the mediterranean -
exhausting the light of the waters.

still, he was saying, there is too much snow.
winter snowed through his mouth.
it too did not let them see each other any more.
it fell on their hands and put them out.

Ioan Es. Pop, from *The Livid Worlds

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

"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.

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

you, an event on my retina
an accident of time colliding with itself
my hands have pulse on your t-shirt
everything in its place like a silence
waiting to happen
the speed of smile measured in light-seconds
this body is a house of metaphors
a space for living words forgetting my name

this feeling that keeps me alive, cauterized by light. the silence of silence is yet possible in the sonority of clouds and the delight of roots. the discreet spaces of time finding a voice, some harmonic highlights. it's not only the moon that gives meaning to void, fullness empties itself into the screaming of colour. almost here, almost there everything scatters, conjoines, rejoices  regurgitated by dreams. seeing with your heart an homage to the interconnectedness of life. I pass through you, you pass through me for a moment as short as a breath. our hands leave behind a trace of something, a roaring heart attuned to herself

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.

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

something twinkles
tingles quivers
in warm hands
in stuck feet
something moves
an eyebrow or a lip
the wavelength of hope
or void
we need the world
we need each other
badly

we invent sinking
swimming & drowning
in this density
we face adversity and fear
how we can
dancers dream
with their feet
mourners dream
with rivers
haters dream
in the silence of tombs

we go outside of ourselves
to find the world
inside
there is creativity
in healing

what if everyday
is a poem
in this fluid
called life

where the air has no memory
for the mountains to keep growing
I welcome the arrival of the birds,
the promise of fresh myths
the seduction is the constancy of the heartbeat, for me
the intensity of dreams stronger than ever
dreams that willingly transmute themselves  into reality

I welcome those walking the path of love
now that I finally start to see the unseen of the horizon
no more endings confused with beginnings
this is the secret garden where my heart
is growing wiser bolder deeper even more eager
to surrender herself to the sweet craziness of the world
to the thoughtfulness of mornings
anew

there in the land of the wind
the grass would like to be as tall as you
the salt of the earth would be ringing,
resonant with the laughter of tears
perhaps everything we are
has to conceive a symbolic death
to deliver ourselves

in the embryo of words there is
such a gentleness, a true prophecy:
language would begin to forget itself
we meet in this language without words
like two beings from the end of the world

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

silence was improvising in my eyes
in this tender fog between one moment
and this moment
and I could see the old love approaching
to invade me
to intoxicate me
with its hypnotic violence
this love like a fossilized wood in their gaze
came to visit me
again
with so many faces
so many whispers
it was as if angels had descended
on the barren land and
with their unthought hands
were tenderly carressing
the old bones unsung
what else could have I done
than
open my eyes and dream
the palimpsest of forgotten dreams
forged in the greatest intensity
of all the fleeting moments
in which
they blinked

(I need to shelter my heart from
the silence of decaying leaves
from the violence of life destroying
itself)

this manic song
of my feet with your feet
the quest for our names
our bodies without fence
my fingerprints like unburnt stories
on your skin
I have no alibi
you invented my desire

the whale-song of
my shoulder with your shoulder
I'm falling apart in your palms:
I invented your desire
and you have no excuse -
you hold down the night
for the next you, the new me
the unforeseen smile
at the end of the day

this time was that time, perhaps
your fingers smell of orange peels, of Babel
I didn't  dream of a white Christmas
Alexa played december songs
that pierced through my heart,
a distant thunder she became,
the countdown of a little miracle.
a day to lighten up the ancient symbols
to keep you close in innocently round
tears

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

For a year now
the cassette tape
has been played
over and over again.

We wake up
and with a swig
of loss
of death
and some tears
we swallow a pill of hope.

We follow a path
winding back and forth like a children’s swing –
long
and exhausting,
a path we know for sure
will end in a fall into
the mud of death.

Many times
we tried
to sew up the holes
that were pierced in our hearts
then we realized
our hearts have become sieves.
The pebbles of death
the tears of sadness
and the heavy memories
are too big to leak out.

by Asmaa Dwaima

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