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

by Eleanor Farjeon

Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
the weeping of an uninvented eye
the tear of the eye
of the one who must be beautiful
of the one who must be happy.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

There is no space wider than that of grief
there is no universe like that which bleeds.

from Extravagaria

I have no choice but to breath this air
or do I? I can speak and I can write
something about anything,
I can witness the hows the whys
pro and cons of the daily agenda
freedom has a local flavour
idealogy a bitter taste

discrete pockets of life disjointed
I meet them on the streets
the social body this rags when
policemen rebel against the truth
doctors against health
teachers against compassion
politicians against duty
a slaughter house the mind in action

we look the other way with a laugh
not to see the epidemic of helplessness
political physiology gone awry
oppression cemented in our deeper minds
we carry it in our shoulders like
a gun machine waiting to happen
the collective focus a borderline land
the air itself suffocated by the
politics creating despair so that
minds have no more sceneries
to dream the world into existence
or do they?

when I am silent I become the absence of silence
I'm thinkig your body, I'm sensing your mind
my hands rehearse the circle theory,
the openings of the horizon hiding in plain sight
time plus time is a world without hyperbole,
but the courage of enchantment
even the fields dream about the all in one
cause it's poppies time and panta rhei

The poet cannot talk about what he already knows.
Northrop Frye

light splits the world in seen and unseen
night accelerates some fascination
I contemplate the poverty of words
who is doing the autopsy of freedom or something,
a requiem for a country that torments its name
streets don't smell of winter but of loneliness and oblivion, exhaustion and rage
some have already forgotten the meaning of blood
we like sweating not weeping, cursing not dreaming, finding the stain not the brain of fog
we practice forgetting like the snake charmers

dreams look like second hand stores, like the promise of the apocalypse,  a local version of Munch's scream, like an uninvented wheel or the beginning of the world.
an old lady sells fir wreaths in disbelief
too many drugstores ignore the untethered soul,  
a place of redemption they are, unwittingly

here there are poets, there are beasts, gentle souls and blind alleys,
indifferent smiles and lazy hands
and who can hear/bear the echo of that song... better dead than communists, comrades
province hates the center, the center forgets its north,
the all good sequestred against the all bad, no dialectics in doublespeak
truth to be told, there is  no consent for telling the truth
ersatz emotions exchanged casually, Hell is other people. always.  some play Russian roulette with reality, we are the heirs of a history disorder
if my dreams are full of birds, waters, lonesome deposits of the flow of time, I have to wonder
is history a desire machine searching for some mythical proportions

this country or a ****** mother with indifferent hands
here citizens have no faces, but interrupted gestures, fractured thoughts without containment
I fear those who cannot cry
without the meaning of blood history has no meaning or maybe it does, look at the speed of some digital thoughts,  the attack of ready made ideas. ideology becomes eulogy

no wonder I don't know how to end this poem
we need new words that contain their power
what is freedom? who knows, who cares.
oh, an old adagio, a gangrene of our undiscovered minds

Perhaps time is a machine gun when it stops. These words capsules for the unbearable. I would go away from the smitten crowd and talk to the sea. I pray to her: at least she examines its hallucinations of power.  To restore the heraclitean movement of our tragic faults. Try to create life with dead words from a dead sea of splendour, but the beauty of words is always unexpected.
Inflation accelerates in this incubator of power, its obscurity a destiny.
Do we still understand the meaning of light when women get pregnant with salty wounds, with poems that decompose as soon as they are born. I'll keep wondering if the echo of the sea grows in circles while this deluge of deception is a tomb for our thoughts without echo. Trauma is ahead of the game shaping falsified days for deranged deeds. Perhaps a sea of laughter is restored somewhere  like a pool of light fleeting on somebody's lips.
How can we see and it's in front of us: cruelty writes history.
Time violates its own decay when the world gets to be somebody's prey.

death comes with a sway
in the cold of the night
in their beds turned to hell
shed a tear stay to pray
for the dormant force
not to take more away
so easy to forget
how fragile we are

we are playing with God's elements
the uncertainty principle unseizable
all we have are these disparaged letters
touched by the pigment of time
we repeatedly ignore the human DNA,
its receptivity, fragility and mistery
the horizon of safety questioned by bombs
whirpools of dread are stocked in our shoulders
the chain reaction of violence precise like the atomic time
it works faster than the splitting of atoms to
iradiate the mind

No one needs to answer to eternity
not beings – lovers or birds
nor things
nor even the elements linked in dark conspiracy
No need to have stopped just there
set down time’s suitcase
(someone once wrote: shaking the dust from his shoes)
to stretch toward what in you always escapes you
but find shelter in blood
salvation will not come from anywhere
but the counted passage of hours
beings and things would pass by like green water between
           riverbanks

lush with grass
or clouds at the edge of a storm
salvation will not come from elsewhere
at the cathedral’s base so many shadows flutter
mortals waiting or wandering
they were the ones you followed down narrow lanes
transfixed by desire
they were carrying time’s suitcase
what law impelled them forward and circling
if not the endless cycle of the seasons?
Finally they broke the spell
perhaps they’ll lead their gangs again between the Rhine and the
    Moselle
saviours of sacks and string
swallows swirled with hawks at the storm’s edge
they sketched your fate

by Emmanuel Moses, from  Preludes and Fugues, translated by Marilyn Hacker

"You dream of a better day, alone with the moon" (Blixa&Teho)

I want to turn my body into protest, they are killed twice:
by hunger and  by bullets in the middle of  hunger
hatred is an invasive species, mistletoe  in reversed veins
I can see how thoughts fracture in the middle of sentence,  unrecognizable streets pose symmetrical questions
how can this be or is this all that can be
how much patience the pain has
death is like Schrodinger's cat,
it can be simultaneously here and there
a surreal space exists where time can't be saved
an invisible hand recycles genesis, invokes innocent beasts
time doesn't pass through all the layers of pain
some are turned into a certain sky, others into frozen movement, another into the fertile soil for growing wings  with which one cannot fly because the wind has not yet been invented

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

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

Darkness and dust

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

Marta Petreu
*translated by Liviu Bleoca

the wind reads me well
I'm a nomad of time
a pulse like a prophecy
whispers myself to me

By the sea, by the dreary, darkening sea,
Stands a youthful man,
His heart all sorrowing, his head all doubting,
And with gloomy lips he questions the billows:
[...]
The billows are murmuring their murmur unceasing,
Wild blows the wind, the dark clouds are fleeting.
The stars are still gleaming, so calmly and cold,
And a fool waits for an answer.

Heinrich Heine, Questioning from the North Sea cycle

witness to this quiet life
certain thoughts understand the soul of birds
there are different orders of truth
order is just the unseen dream of messiness, a flower of chaos
systole and diastole of breathing in strange beings
contradiction intrinsic in all things
I need the anti-me for rhythmic change
perhaps the destiny of the eye is the tear & life
a history of losses, of blocked cycles of pain
a chronicle of laughter, an impression of the light,
a formless night
a mysterious entelechy of
randomness

yes, the tyrant is ready
to destroy with thousands of arms
with thousands of eyes
with thousands of hearts
a denied collective crime after all
and the old circle of darkness about to complete
again
the worm of history is tattooing our dreams

unbearable the recipe of pain

no real tipping point
especially
no turning point
for any tyrant

wooden tongues speak non truths
to be fed by a tyrant freezes the rivers of the mind

being a tyrant is so simple, so natural in a world we've ceased to imagine

this tyrant like any other free
to toy with history as with plasticine
cause we/you/they are as ready as ever
to support him dynamite
the horizon
of time

this flux ripple passage
it creates
structures edges shapes
intermediate areas
transfixed faces:
love or
hums chirps rustle  wooes
sighs sights surrenders
breaking points musings
tsunamis  earthquakes
devastation creation
downfall cries resurections
prayers  longing evolving
endurance & the eye of storms
a touch a strike
the infinite in qualia
soil of oblivion
womb songs invocation
hues of silence
ego destruction murmur
wonder nestled
heart's warehouse
crystal kindness
unknown emergence
fountains
dead languages
renewed light moons sphere
overwhelming beauty
first cry first breath of air
much much more forms
to be turned into
we don't have enough poems
enough air enough shouting
cause horses are in love with the grass
tigers are in love with their prey
mountains are in love with water
pain is in love with stones
love just a reference
and we need to destroy its name
for its true face
this quiet spirit
cosmic vibration
in exaltation

we know the thrill, the trembling, the rush
the falling into falling into falling
only words survive of me as I surface
no escape for the velocity of resonance
a singularity  undescribable
beyond the bones an unfinished poem

you remember the confessions you made to my skin
how I used to touch you as if you were a land of the impossible
still possessed by a dreamy beast, my blood
as if the days hadn't invented the time of dying
love starts with a sigh, with a passing by
waiting for something to happen to the wind

"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

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

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

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

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

Ioanid Romanescu, from Orpheus
translated by Stavros Deligiorgis

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

we are targets for light, for the precision of its
unknown aim, yet we insist in blackening the world
as a self-described pyromaniac, I practice daily rituals with your presence. I tell your name to the wind, to the sheets, to the cup of tea,  to the orchids. then I tell to myself who I am, who you are.
outside the world is drowning in its own guts. your name is incomprehensible, but not to the rituals of the heart, they defy gravity, brevity and bribery. Diffracted on the psychic field your trajectory is eerie, the amplitude of some waves enormous, as I watch them wash the horizon away. dreams are the only shadowless creatures, and still I dream only your shadow. we still don't know why beauty is truth and truth is beauty. oh, happy rituals of the hands: inventing love, writing poetry.

the light is flowing on the naked trees
reality is more beautiful than metaphor,
I'm thinking while I'm feeling
the river of darkness flowing through me
faces gestures smiling and forgetting
destroying the plenitude of not yet known
spring explodes like vitamin bombs in old scars
the life waiting to happen begging for us to contemplate
I'll never stop dreaming someone else's electrical storms
I have to learn how to walk on how to love even more
the skeleton of darkness in the hands of time

finally some light can settle
in the hidden places
between one moment
to another
the wholes of time are filled
with dirt
with blue horror
like on the bottom of the sea

as inside, so outside
as above, so below
they used to say
but light there is a medium
of refraction for darkness
in this desolate place
of destruction
for one to exist
to be real
to feel safe
to have it all
another should be
trashed, diminished,
disfigured, humiliated
not in innocent metaphors
not in unkind dreams
not in works of art
but out there inside or
on the streets busy
with people

such is the gentleness of light
and the merciful god of unity
in the design of heart
when we can still recognize
the human kind

I am still standing here
and quietness can come
cause I've already cried
an ocean of light

the face of man is still burning
in the name of God missing an "o"
while some  "map of  the problematique"
is lying naked in the sun

still,
don't stop the rock & roll
the blissful oblivion
this vital movement
into forgiveness

Something black somewhere      in the vistas of his heart.

Tulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood
to be a tulip and desire no more
but water, but light, but air.
Yet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,
&suffocation; called, dream-whiskey'd pour
sirening. Rosy there

too fly my Phil&Ellen; roses, pal.
Flesh-coloured men&women; come&punt;
under my windows. I rave
or grunt against it, from a flowerless land.
For timeless hours wind most, or not at all. I wind
my clock before I shave.

Soon it will fall dark. Soon you'll see stars
you fevered after, child, man, & did nothing -
compass love to the pencil-torch!
As still as his cadaver, Henry mars
this surface of an earth or other, feet south
eyes bleared west, waking to march.

from  *The Dream Songs

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.

my cells have their own theories and fruits of dying
even porcelain dreams
when I am with you I enter the tunnel of vision
I can see better what happens with fused from confused
me and him trapped in the asylum of gestures
somnabulists through our own skins
while they are busy scrolling
God forbid to hear the sadness of a time
that is getting darker and darker

The longest silences are blue
All the unheard sighs settle in stones
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
And the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
Distant clouds hide their simplicity
in fields of hope

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
The night sky whirls in the wind
its surprise and weeps.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
She was a wild woman; I, a violent man
She knew the stubbornness of tears
I knew the weight of sleep.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
Our mouths postponed day fall
and the silence of time.

On nights like this, we undressed our shadows
I was hers and she was mine
Painting with nakedness the sky
We were each other passion for falling
Our arms kept on crushing
the same way the same day
this forgetful undying.

*That’s all. Far away someone sings. Far away.

Every year the desert
           (with d from devils)
advances fifteen kilometers
           (with k from karma)
dries up springs
            (with s from spirits)
dries up more and more words.
The dictionary is ever more famished -
essences on the leap
stop for a second over the abyss,
then whiten the cracked earth.
The poet watches
the pure skulls of the words;
the words, still living and hungry,
watch the poet.

By Grete Tartler, translated by Liviu Bleoca

time has a savage chemistry
it flows in silence in the depth of life
stolen or borrowed, hidden & fluent
and I am this space for time
to learn how to love itself &
the transparency of mystery

“Johnny's always running around
Trying to find certainty”*

you know this, don’t you?
I only knew you forward, unbearable
when I felt the foam of dawn
on your lips

and how wild fields bloom backwards
in the secrets of wind
in the culture of shame

that helpless zealous boy
with his eyes turned inwards
we are light and fiction
depending on the various proportions
in the geography of sight

we haven’t found out yet
the hidden geometry of thought
I’ve carried around this silently violent lover
an offering to the disappeared
to the void between your teeth

I never knew you

but your screaming point

no doors, complete surrender,
this vibrational mode
listening to the silence of your skin
I offer myself as a curb of melting points
you give yourself as screaming locks

don’t stop tearing me with gentleness
I’ll found myself again
into the liquid mercy in the beginning
the solid idea of us

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

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

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

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

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

**Nichita Danilov

I was so very aware
that the afternoon was dying in the domes,
and all around me sounds froze,
turned to winding pillars.

I was so very aware
that the undulant drift of scents
was collapsing into darkness,
and it seemed I had never tasted
the cold.

Suddenly
I awoke so far away
and strange,
wandering behind my face
as though I had hidden my feelings
in the senseless relief of the moon.

I was so very aware
that
I did not recognize you, and perhaps
you come, always,
every hour, every second,
moving through my vigil - then -
as through the spectre of a triumphal arch.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

“My wound existed before me;
I was born to embody it.”*
Joë Bousquet

No anaesthetic rhyming with aesthetic for the cracks of words now **** it! This pain keeps inventing skies to fall into, glass screams, corroded nails Crying comes from far away Words grow flesh Between fingers Herds are trampling on my heart inside plastic horizons This stupendous silence then Take my bones from yesterday Future is a catapult What if I am only a girl facing this      Breathe out

I am the possession/oppression The oppressor is me Pain is not a stylistic experiment Where can I hide my ears I crawled I bent Disfigured I had to pick up my eyes from fences, my lungs from the mirror I have a body full of used words, slapped doors, walls swollen by silence Hope to get used to be treated in the third person No poetics of space Pain is this quarry in me L’habitude of memory

I left my cigarettes today
the same way you leave the departed
I put them in their tombs of desire
their pain had infected me enough
like an invisible netwok of mold
decomposing dreams
my own

my secret garden  
already planted
my name chosen
my path clear
in their hidden mind
I had to love them all:
and I will, always
with quiet ardor,
adoration, gratitude

my secret garden a jungle
of emptiness
denied tenderness
never spoken words of love
terrors and longings,
unrequited pain

for so long I've been
my father's mother
in my hidden soul
what has survived
of me
was poetry

no language
complex
no methaphors
no more tears
for this raw truth
the only mother
for me
was poetry
when
there was beauty
in the sky
so crushing

When the hand which writes takes a rest
it seems to me demonically transparent;
beneath its skin, veins like a few plants
in a fishbowl — and the blood
flows within and floods
the silence; its murmur through time
the unlived life of the ancestors
rushing into the light of my eyes.

Dumitru Chioaru, from *It Might Take Me Years

silence falls over me from above
the sea songs in my hair wait for an allusion
my hips are shelter for the dance of blue shades
love is this imprecise semiosis even when
you go into specifics about its wavelengths
the splitting time of atoms,
its intensity, radiation and schedule

my steps leave no trace, my hands have no voice in your deja vu
a semiotic thing your imaginary body
there is no point in living only in one dimension
an unknowable god takes snapshots from our deeper minds while
love is just this superimposed image falling from above, turning into the sea

Then we met more often.
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora.
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth.
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight.
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I loved you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things.

Nichita Stanescu

a fearless incantation in my watery hands
that show you things you don't wanna know
about the fluidity of bones
I imagine with my fingers poems  you've never
asked for cause happiness is a bitter woman for you
take me back home from the land of noise
keep me in your armpit like the shadow of a smile

When does the butterfly in flight read what’s written on its
wings? Pablo Neruda
Humans cannot bare too much reality. T.S. Elliot

what is
lost in a labyrinth of questions crushed by height
only the sky is the limit is the lie. lies have borders
"What is it you want?" asks Ivan Ilych
“What do I want? Not to suffer. To live”
in their words a map of darkness
the heart of stones stops. it's so
easy to split the light with digital words
the immunity of the herd shelter for violence

I recognize the feeling as I recognize the shadow of words
it makes poetry bleed out of dreams
we understand so well how Oedipus was manipulated by fate
thoughts without borders hide from themselves
when the world is unthinkable the mind is a no man's land
their smile  an eclipse of blood, in the middle of noise
life fights with its own scream

the certainty of tears pushed far away... behind the gaze till it spews hatred
a cry: the brides have forgotten to wear white,
digital happiness is unbearable
solitary selves search for communion but
the antihero doesn't ask who he is
this thought experiment terrorizes the inception of morning

a never ending cycle the desire
spectacular lives clash with normative statements
the empty father dillema in a fatherless society: some are afraid to be swallowed by the womb of the world
the resurection of the canon: the cross is hungry
let's discover these embalmed animals: our hearts

lay down the blade of thought
linden trees are blooming

to A.C.
"Love is a wave
Inside our bodies"

we want to give it all away
give it to our shadow
heaviness, breath, despair
our shadows so thin so tormented by light
we are the contour of our tears
often times you happen to yourself
and some bliss in the depth of
fiercely found wisdom

there is so much space in our eyes
for the world to shiver anew to pass
through us like the shadow of light
you want to be held in the space of a heart
we need more space in the eye of the other for
our shadows to play unhindered in the quiet light

on this edge I hear different
things with different ears
the rain in close deserts
the emptiness of hours rolling into
something larger than themselves
your self, my self, their selves trapped nebulae
inside the knife of time carving wise bodies
when the flood of blood gets disconnected from the heart
bodies full of tears recycle the vaults of thought
I am no other than myself frozen in a primordial space,
a shelter for the pain of those I love

Little by little she became a word,
bundles of soul on the wind,
a dolphin in the clutches of my eyebrows,
a stone provoking rings in water,
a star inside my knee,
a sky inside my shoulder,
and I inside I.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

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

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

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

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

silence
shimmering with the embers
of unspoken words

silence
molding the air like clay

silence that touches
with the clarity of its language,
with its glow
under the skin

your silence
stronger than the noisy city
that I am crossing today

Ioana Ieronim, **The Lens of a Flame

Silence as of one million closed doors
bestow powerful illusions upon loneliness,
it lights up the memory of its sons
even before they are born,
it carefully razes
the trees in which hamadryades slumber,
shut me up inside
the being that I am - so I do not know what I am -
and throw a light for all time
upon the moment of my death

Ioanid Romanescu, from **Magic

this simplicity
of being
not afraid
to be caught
with wind
in your pockets

I didn’t know you were here to stay... you’ve found a place to rest inside this chest. there is no one there, on the other side. why can I measure my life in pain-years?  I am going to listen to the weight of your step... we are so many... poor bodies with slaughtered desires. life lifts up gently like hypnotic steam from raw bodies while you growl inside my bones. you have thorns of truth and short sentences: “papa doesn’t love me”, “mama keeps cursing”, “I am useless”. you are the only thing alive since I insist to lay down in my mother womb over and over again. have me expelled, have me covered in a blanket of blood so that I do not see the future.  you keep giving birth to my selves.
stop looking at me with charcoal eyes, father
look, mother, you can have me silenced for the beauty of dawn