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

a world reinventing prayer: it is beauty
tearing me down

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

suddenly I need to find you
and I do not know how to do that
where

the paths across land and water
teasing

hidden and mute
Time revolves
with its slow quickness
quick
slowness

grain of sand upon grain

until I happen
just happen
to remember
myself

and there
you are

Ioana Ieronim, **The Lens of a Flame

forests remain, farther and farther away from us.

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

always, along this way

forever unwalked
given back to me

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

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

Andrei Zanca  from *My Cup of Light

a wild god is sleeping in your bones
it is too early to tell the direction
of that thought, you know
it has a dark end
no need for an algorithm
for wonder

wild images colonize my brain
they throw me here and there
it's not too late under the roof of the world
not for a bleaching heart

something is growing like a wave
that forgot its end

“when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.” Grace Paley

fall into me
on blackout days
for something beautiful
is here is everywhere
is nowhere
you knew it
Borges used it
beauty is a physical sensation
the axis mundi piercing
the palms of my hands

memory like a gipsy woman
who reads palms
beauty, yes, it draws the soul
ascetic
I figured it out in the smiling of your sleep
like babies smile to angels, they say
this game that keeps us alive is hers
golden beetles die for it
of for the love of dust

pastimes of gods its archives
everyday the light tastes differently
the body moves where the mind is
or the other way round
I'll read Cartarescu to you half naked
one page a day

beauty is the quest,
this spiral of wonder
filling up the rest &
my nails

there is something good
and some light
in this desire
enraging my cells
with divination chanting
sculpting my shape
in violent curves
I don't recongnize the hues
of mornings
because of frenzy:
the new definition of gravity
along the lines
mesmerizing visions of
softness and caring

love is a whirlwind
in any language
a clear water
so you can see
how translucent
nakedness can be

hers is
the bending of space
to smaller and smaller
atoms of delight,
fusion, diffusion, infusion

it holds you tight
from the very centre
(heart&lungs)
when it breaks you
and then these traces
the swarming of photons
in the fabric of skin
sweet radiance,
energetic warmness
an arch, a cohort of waves
crushing everything
like cherries' sense
reality sense
roads' sense

a scarring refusing
to scream/bleed
defiance of stillness
music of laughter
sun raising in your hands

there is something beautiful
for the poetess in me
it just describes herself well
for the never-day
it transmutes
anything:
beauty into horror
horror into despair
despair into words
even thought into
singing birds

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

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

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

when the world gets unbearable I retreat into the purity of words
do I own this heart or she owns me
an excedent of beats today as if I was traversed by an invisible sigh
my thoughts are a nomadic population searching for a soil without fear
death presents itself as an indifferent character, a secondary thing, an involuntary business, the latest fashion
who cares about the pain of the air
the skin of hours can hardly hold minds under siege
nights melt time like wax while I need to look at helplessness from a different angle
an unpredictible trajectory decides for the mornings we wake up into
there is space in the centre of words while the sky is eroded by death's toys
the eyes stand in the way some say we must die on earth to be born in the sky,  the sky disagrees, the dust clots
there are patches of blue sky somewhere, there is enough silence to hear the explosions in one's head or the augmented beauty of sleep
power miscalculates its claims in the impermanence of bones

here horizon feels like the palm of a god
the lake receives the fury of summer
un unutterable feeling pushes my hands into firestorms
light rests on everything heavy as the clouds
birds carry their chirp into the destiny of the air
the moon hides somewhere in the silence of the forest
my eyes are too small a nest for the  flow of wonder

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

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

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

i follow pain everywhere she wants to take me
she reveals a cosmos in a tear,
the layers of time kept together by the vitality of light.
silences rest in between our dreams
the clouds are enough for the wind
branches enough for the birds
love is holding its antonyms with gentleness
i follow pain into the camera obscura of hope
wars are trapped in the flash of words without flesh.
the lament in the loops of time, so much

sleepless forests
in my dreams
embracing the shape of you
sung by the pine trees

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

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

by Charif Shanahan

who knows if we trully own our words
or they own us
too many sunsets and dawns are happening in the same time
and the departed are tormenting us with the song of their flesh
I found a rhyme in you
absence rhymes with presence
somewhere in the hands of time

You were so absent while washing
your face in the morning, you never saw
how the linden in the courtyard reached a limb
through the bathroom window and shook
sticky seeds into your hair. Your hair grayed
in this working class neighbourhood you’d heard
already as a child smelled like a ruined life.
The turrets of the little Russian church
once looked so fragile to you – you wanted
to feed them carrots from your hand
and croutons. Your heart was alive.
Your heart was like an iodine rain
over a crowd of crushed heads.

By Dan Sociu, from Sentimental and Naïve Poetry, translated
by Oana Sanziana Marian

things went accordingly
explosive by the book
consequently I found
pineful silhouettes
fossils of empty hands
floating poems
the boundaries of words
silk illusions or outrageous life
frozen layers of pain
pigments of pride
here is the splitting point
hey, don’t leave with me-crumbs
on your shoulders
I could make you the watchman of dreams
were they to loosen their grip

I am the daughter
of those serious people
without tears
the first flash of light-
the primordial invasion
violence against unformed space
a trapping container
I had to find escaping routes
from my mother’s womb
it chewed me out
it left me with no skin
so naked,  insane

I couldn’t try my birth before
only measure my pace
put it into question marks
spin around in memory-years
till it hit me that
I was so old
when I was born
not to hold on to
the vortex of wonder
the essence of reverie
the crest & zest of words
till I can make it
to the other side
of gravity

I'll wear the seduced horizons
and you'll drug me with silence
or rhyme bossa nova in my blood

air, tears, poetry, color
just names for the hunger of that space
in between my train of thoughts
when it happens -
the scent of you in the morning
and dried flowers in your eyes
it's just...
the hand forgets the handle
and the feet unlock the weight

soon baby, soon
there will be something singing
when skies are flowing
and wonders can/should/might
give me some
of your bright

I feel time running like a wild animal tnrough my body
the air might hide from itself in the frenzy of an embrace
the molecules of emotion create the music of muscles, of spheres
I watch this momentum of life unfolding, rising and decreasing
passion feeds the wind, the waters, the eartquakes, it dances on liminal edges
bound and unbound the pulse of creation, of destruction
I am so very quiet, as quiet as the retina that translates the light
when the light touches you my optic nerves get burned but look
how strange,
I see further away into the clarity of hands

the soul of joy grows in circles
it glitters in children's cheeks
singing together washes away
the momentum of nonsense
I contemplate the unknown,
the right proportion of light of darkness
their breath kept in balance,
the golden harvest of hearts,
of hours
the fir tree gives away
some scent, some wonder

Merry Christmas

my winter eyes are epic
emptied of the seduction
of never dying days
for now
but
still looking for an incantation:
this field this wave this sway
this maze this daze
the soul's substance
untranslatable
allusive
perfumed

some find it in the dark recesses
some insist it doesnt't exist
I contemplate blankness inside
my skin
my mind just a dream catcher
for illusions
a suspended note
an erasable tape
a network for the delicate architecture of moss
or was it mold?
some words have no heart at all
and we need canyons of tenderness, paths of joy
is it time that is dripping its imagination
in this turmoil?

the irrationality of mornings of violins of drums
strikes a chord inside
what is the basis of harmony?
so many shapes of wonder
on bridges, shores, sidewalks and hills
and valleys of the unknown
full of space atoms

a spirit of a shaman sits beside me
she calls me soul surfer
perhaps
god is
part violence
part beauty
part wonder
and I fall for it
when I find it
in the flesh
of the heart
only

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

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

The temple bell stops -
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Matsuo Basho

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