If we do not inhabit our verses,
what is the use of writing?

Eminescu, Rilke, Byron and Mandelstam
succeeded.

Grapes squeezed in a timepress.

If we are not alive in our images
what remains of poets?

Dew and ink,
Labour, symmetries?

Blood is the only colour
That can’t be erased from a book.

Adrian Popescu, from My Cup of Light
translated by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart