light lingers on stones
I love to be a spectator
women's hair hallucinates sunflowers
time is hitting the walls
today our ribs/smiles don't hurt
these pavements are the custodians
of wind's secrets
our eyes see without effort
a strange divination possesses this journey
from egg to coffin

light travel through us as if through
an ocean of bones
a poem dreams its exile into words
the trees let us see the seeds of time
we confuse happiness
with the boutique of dreams
and that's alright
some magic was saved on Noah's ark

springtime smells of women's hands
a young man conjures an intact eden
silence is grinding the air
at the end of things, the root of water

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls
Fever Ray

to the east desire, to the west dying, the south is torrid, the north is quiet. no map can contain a wild abandon. hic sunt leones.
your arms compete with the wind, your eyes scorch me. my fingers are mad with the sweetness of dried flowers.  the roots of days are electric.  only to the night I confess my devotion, this transition from my skin to yours

this blood
an unseen weeping
pour me into the palm
of your hands
I wanna
flow

within the solitude of the dreadful span
of the blackened and bowed sky
the deep withered grass bends in the moonless dark
quieting the cold and murmuring earth

hushing her into fitful sleep

the air is hard
and the wind lacerates the night
razor incisions left behind
in the icy flesh of obsidian hours

open wounds howl like wolves
on the trail of prey in flight

I hunger for you
under the restless stars

this feeling that keeps me alive, cauterized by light. the silence of silence is yet possible in the sonority of clouds and the delight of roots. the discreet spaces of time finding a voice, some harmonic highlights. it's not only the moon that gives meaning to void, fullness empties itself into the screaming of colour. almost here, almost there everything scatters, conjoines, rejoices  regurgitated by dreams. seeing with your heart an homage to the interconnectedness of life. I pass through you, you pass through me for a moment as short as a breath. our hands leave behind a trace of something, a roaring heart attuned to herself

She was a girl with oceans inside her,
waves made of dreams too fragile to hold.
But the world is indifferent —
it pulls, it drowns, it takes,
leaving salt in the wounds it never cared to see.
Her tides fought back,
rising, crashing,
begging to be enough,
until exhaustion felt like peace.
Now she floats,
not sinking,
not swimming,
just there.

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

Matsuo Basho

night rests her weight on my shoulders
the cry of seagulls tears the unconscious of morning
I see what I need to see, the stranger in me
I absorb crises, storms, bridges,
life's torment  to invent its limits
the differance - the forgotten passion of language
the effete and the barbarian.
the sun also rises unhindered
on wheat plantations

last night I dreamt the Authority of dreaming
I had to send a petition so they tell me how to end the dream.
dreams do no harm when they keep their innocence
between innocence and experience a handful of pebbles
to help find our way in the blinding light

words transcend themselves in that land without atmosphere:
the atoms of seconds colliding in my tissues
they arrive  in a living body with her inaudible pulses
the cry of an owl defies the noise without depth: the city descends into the nocturnal abrogation of its chimera
a sudden ripple in the density of flesh, this moment reveals its round edges,  the full potential of a feeling to mould itself into an acustic tenderness
fugitive thoughts denounce their orbit in a vertical intensity
an asymmetric perspective captures my hands : time is poetry. poetry, the descent into a living anarchy, an elusive certainty.
love, a mirror reflecting myriad forms & the insistence of stones. stones, the endurance of time caught up in its excitement,
a pulse untranslatable into other than oneself.

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