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

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

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

This shrinking violet that created Man
A fragile pawn of innocence
So many years
Why must I shrivel and die
Why must this tree ravage my fruits
I'm laid bare, this visible me

Leap years. Thoughts that will never
learn to fly. A chance
that will be reborn as pride
if time so decides.

I recognized you by the taste
of your lips - too sweet to be true.
I know there will come
a time when the eyes will forget
how to cry.

What I will have left of you is a tear
turned into amber,
a silent future, a cursed era.
There will be neither shadow
nor light anymore.

There will be no more silent breath,
suffering word, fog that fawns
on my bare knees.
Tomorrow we will wake up
on the other side of loneliness -
where forests burn,
where freedom becomes torment.

I tried to admit to a life
I did not commit. However, fate,
this incurable hypochondriac,
wanted to sentence me
to a lifetime of memory.

Beyond the barricades of memories,
grace, harnessed to heaven,
echoes back to me; somewhere inside
there are sleepless tears I will never
understand. I can't dream in a way
that would make the earth
kneel before me.

I dare not look in such a way
that the sky departs forever
into the unknown.
Time will forever remain a desert island.