Lord, how much life can reside in a tree?
I don’t even know his name, but then
I write down my poems every day
On pieces of paper made from his skin.

He has witnessed my winter tears
And I have enjoyed his blossoms when it’s warm
Even though my window, looking to the sky,
Doesn’t reach as far as his outstretched arms.

When I’m in pain, he
Sings my tribulations.
Even then, between us
There’s a silence so enormous
That it takes in everything
From madness to desperation:
Blasphemy, the miracle above,
Prayer and a cry of love.

Sometimes, after ages of this silence between
Us, a single leaf falls down. And then,
Without knowing why, or what the cost,
A grateful universe learns by heart
What it’s lost.

by Ana Blandiana, translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea

It all can’t be done
As many ways to do it
As there are things to be done
As many outcomes desired
As ones to desire it

How to decide
Which path to take?
How to know what to want?
When we murdered god
And failed to do better?

In its own image
The children of gods are born
They too will fail to build heaven
The dreams set out
By god itself

For there is nothing
In any place within or out
That can be created or made new
If not destroying or replacing
What came before

there in the land of the wind
the grass would like to be as tall as you
the salt of the earth would be ringing,
resonant with the laughter of tears
perhaps everything we are
has to conceive a symbolic death
to deliver ourselves

in the embryo of words there is
such a gentleness, a true prophecy:
language would begin to forget itself
we meet in this language without words
like two beings from the end of the world

I am unknown to myself
when I look for a silhouette or
your stroboscopic touch
the canon of your steps full of woe
an infinitive phrase your timeless smile
silence has its alchemy
poetry finds me like a sacrificial song
being ourselves is enough
nothing more nothing less
the radiance of time a promise
who will be the woman dying one final death
is a stranger to me.
sing to me with the voice of morning
you, woes of laughter spirit

Shrouded in this mystical darkness
The tenderness of fog a good company
The winter silence reinventing its language
The inception of tears suspended
How wonderful to love everything as it is
Like trees love the patience of earth

it happened in an instant
like an eternity of wonder crushed by a wink
night is a prophet, I often think, for better or worse
with its truth of immensity, its molecules of light  and
dreams' oscillation. there are nights and nights
when I feel the ripples of spacetime moving with the speed of desire

some poems are unreadable since I taste the power of words
biology dreams of giving herself to waterfalls in an embrace
chemistry can be caught dreaming to break the symmetry
of its isomorphic structures
physics refuses to disentangle the fields, the particles from their resonant selves
a tender savage disposition is collapsing time, is playing hide and seek
an Irish band sing for someone

my knees feel the earth, the dreams of tundra
I am still myself when my mind is shattered
there is love, there is death in the centre of something
indescribable

this time was that time, perhaps
your fingers smell of orange peels, of Babel
I didn't  dream of a white Christmas
Alexa played december songs
that pierced through my heart,
a distant thunder she became,
the countdown of a little miracle.
a day to lighten up the ancient symbols
to keep you close in innocently round
tears