Speak, you also,
speak as the last,
have your say.

Speak -
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midday and midday and midnight,

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive -
where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go?
Upward. ***** your way up.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer.
Finer: a thread by which
it wants to be lowered, the star:
to float further down, down below
where it sees itself glitter:
on sand dunes of wandering words.

by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger

words stumble between teeth
this house has pitfalls instead of windows
silence is a stethoscope full of tears
in this girdle, the cage of pain
when the day’s edges play hide and seek
with my drained smile
I wait like a statue of salt
for this faraway yearning
to grow
curseless eyes

hands sliding
sounds gliding
minds swirling
in this dance
of stillnes

gaps filled
with
longing
arising
dwelling

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

he survives his story kept in boxes and knives
the dread of forgotten runes keeps him company
mother repression father night
emptiness surrounded by invisible walls
death a continent for the living

I am facing this vortex of muted music
with empty hands, despair and white hair
no solace for the unshed tears
everyday he tells me something
about nothing

My grandmother was married by the communist party. Yes, don’t be surprised. Comrade Soare insisted: comrade Alexandru is a promising man, he knows the right direction for the world to go. Grandma wasn’t convinced, but the party insisted, it was her duty.  They lived in a city where every street had a dark end. Women were not allowed to have silence between their legs. Only arms filled with zest. My father married my mother for the garden. For the apple trees, peach trees, cherry trees, for daffodils, roses, for the raspberry. Their minds colonized,  the right to think abolished. The right to feel obscured. Politics of desire mystified. The wind had ears. But they were proud, they were tall, they looked the other way. They carried history in their teeth without laughter. I came along as an unfinished story. The debris of time filled my mother’s womb. It was never mine. They gave me the demand of truth: touch feels good. A living soul is necessary. Thinking is vital. Community is air.  We need each other.
One day I knew, how it happens. My blood started flowing with cataclysmic power.  This is not the time for Hollywood love stories,  but honest touching. You spin my mind, and I keep dancing.  I carry your body in my silences just for the sake of the world.  I had to cry. Passion is terrifying. You suddenly don’t recognize the meaning of crossroads. The world gets swept away.  I feel like shouting at the speed of the world decomposing. You make me laugh.  What if love is a tyrant?  There is emptiness hidden in the seed of desire. I had to learn from tears, from disembodied words.  I have to learn again the meaning of freedom. Who knows what is this everything that matters?

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

some mirrors sewn by my hips
some sewn by my hands
some inside my mind
cause I am strange
some songs remain the same
I hear this again
I am too sensitive
too serious
too vocal
too tired
too absent or too silent?
too crazy (but what do you mean?)
I am scarry, she said, but fascinating
well, loneliness is not fascinating
I wanna shout but I refrain myself
from this refrain
it can be a blessing, I agree
but wait, there's more
cause I speak some bizarre words
bizarre as in the byzantium
although I try to keep it as simple
as the milk foam on your lips

yes, this is my language
and these are my days
to be too much of myself
exactly as I am in each breath
each step and each cry
as strange as any creature
that has ever walked under
the light tide

if you find me too strange
you can look the other way

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

suddenly everything has forgotten its rythm
the sky was shouting at the mountains
the wind was shouting at the trees
the sea at a naughty kite
some words were looking for their delta
and their hearts of stone
my sleep was taken away by migrant birds.
it must have been then
when I started to love you
like madness loves its forgetting

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

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...

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

tears are
weight
taste
colour
music
they are in love with
the gravitational attraction
I tried their speed today

tears are full of
heartbeat
screams
interrupted gestures
helplessness
the god of sweating
the dance of life
the unknown of the sublime

my tears are full of
the broken world
in their eyes
the sea of time spinning
its fountain of hope and despair

these tears are
full of me, of you
of us & them
again and again
full of  "creative ambiguity"
true wholeheartedness

I remember
it was fog and
then it was light and
I was already falling
outside of myself
thank you
for showing me
the way back
thank you
for wonder
with it
I write poetry
everyday

forehead to forehead
and closed eyes

so close that we fall in place
like folds of silk
like folds of wool

like our flesh that knows so much
and can so much
forget

Ioana Ieronim from *Ariadne's Veil

“To live is to be slowly born.”*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

not forgetting flames me up
like a foam of whispers
bursts into with laconic daring
over darkened waters
your name hangs unwritten
I rolled over on a rib
but it's useless
how long am I going to ferment you in my armpit
with your fragile ****** smile?
chase me away like the passersby do
with the meaning of travelling
I was not and you were not
you were not in my dying
we were only a laden pool of sunlight
I didn't find any solution
than to behead the days
these thin days unraveled from myself
from the bone of the world peeled of magic
the art of forgetting is for those
who sleep on pillows

such a long, long road
I've been travelling to a destination
obliterated by pain
to this gravitational center, to this place
with no hiding space
only mute seagulls
have seen my screaming
I've cursed myself on pages,
diaries of gory hours
I've cupped myself in belated answers,
dancing tears
more than eyes can meet

while I was forgetting nothing about everything
the world revolved once, twice, a dozen of times
you were learning to dissipate your name
to waste it on the lapel of not yet discovered seas
in the silence of leaves

now I know this calmness,
this tenderness of dying
I could write this unthreatening poem
today, tomorrow
till forever finds some peace
perhaps
some forgetting

I’ve written on a flyleaf: I hate you, mon amour
with hard working passion I hate you.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe, your father have told you.

you’ve been so busy to cut the day off from the night
-quite an old fashion-
and just when the silence evacuates  its void to be the great pretender
perhaps Magritte had dreams about annihilation to compensate a ******
but I was dreaming of you sleeping with lions

I’ve felt your cage – the splitting of now and then into so many suspicions –
unbearable waking hour -  I wake up in the dark and I can see that I love you

when the hour gently subsides to the moon
and I can find no comfort in haunting memories
I pray to the air to touch my lips with your gaze

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

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

What is the flower that blooms each year
In flowerless days,
Making a little blaze
On the bleak earth, giving my heart some cheer?

Harsh the sky and hard the ground
When the Christmas rose is found.
Look! Its white star, low on earth,
Rays a vision of rebirth.

Who is the child that's born each year -
His bedding, straw:
His grace, enough to thaw
My wintering life, and melt a world's despair?

Harsh the sky and hard the earth
When the Christmas child comes forth.
Look! Around a stable throne
Beasts and wise men are at one.

What men are we that, year on year,
We Herod-wise
In our cold wits devise
A death of innocents, a rule of fear?

Hushed your earth, full-starred your sky
For a new nativity:
Be born in us, relieve our plight,
Christmas child, you rose of light!

by Cecil Day-Lewis, from " A Poet for Every Day of The Year"

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

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
    But you’re in it all the same.

    So why not get started immediately.

    I mean, belonging to it.
    There is so much to admire, to weep over.

    And to write music or poems about.

    Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
    Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
    Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
    Bless touching.

    You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
    Or not.
    I am speaking from the fortunate platform
    of many years,
    none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
    Do you need a ****?
    Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
    Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
    and remind you of Keats,
    so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
    he had a lifetime.

**Mary Oliver

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

how many people do I hold in my breath?
how many lives in my veins?
I do go gently into that good night
(thank you Dylan, meet you there)
To my good aged mothers
To my good aged fathers
To unfold the creases of time

Blinks of eternity they were
Carrying the weight of days
So that my tomorrow
Can be

At dawn the earth gently curves
Giving darkness a name
And I bent over the horizon
In a heart reverence
To my good old mothers
To my good old fathers

Their curses  sculpted the clay
Which I tread on
They planted  their harsh truths
With eagerness, with tears,
With oblivion or patience
And I wonder how the wind
Touched them
How the dust molded
Their wrinkles
How the darkness hid them
From themselves

My mother had a mother
My father had a father
They were young
They were wild
Their dreams ripened
In the sun

And then…
Their living gods
Their violins accompanied
By failure
Their praying to the sea,
To the rain, to the springs
To the sweetness of grapes

Their bones sing in my dreams

It is their right
To be touched
by the waxing
and waning
of time
and love cannot be
without
Innocence

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

By Jalaluddin Rumi

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

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