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