Before me, nothing is what
it used to be; all seams getting ready to be;
a child with a hoop runs by, as in De Chirico's paintings
- in the distance the sky's still red, but in the poem it's gray.
I feel the words growing inside my fingers
and for the first time not for my benefit.
In the quiet of evening
the town seems a game with toy bricks
in which matches are struck and flare brightly - music cavorts at
                                                                                                       the windows -
in the distance the sky's gray, but in the poem is red.

Gellu Dorian, from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Doina Iordachescu

It might take me years
To dislodge myself from
Life – this magma which has swallowed me,
And be out of the reach of neighbour gossip.
To emerge from a fight not mine.
You were there, privileged angel in the dark,
Amused at my faux ferocity,
Recalling the courage of my first days,
When I was unconcerned about
What place I’d fall asleep in.
Not yet understanding
The human need to cling to a past.
Always ready to give myself away.

You watched from above
The prose of my struggles,
In the web of our common suffocation.
You knew how to be the cruel one,
To leave everything behind, in a town to which
You would never return.
Today I fear the drizzle,
I fear the fog.
I never forget my umbrella at home.
I mind the hustle of the quay,
Unusual at this early hour.
I cherish the noises which accompany my coffee on the terrace.
I watch helplessly, in exasperation,
These faces of common poems
Which harbours always hold.

Constantin Abaluta, from *It Might Take Me Years

i told you to stay away from mornings,
their raw sun is not for us.
whereas the blurred and heavy sun of our world
hardly steams up the horizon. we are
at the beginning of another world and of others suns.

you've remained alone. it's good. you have the whole past at hand.
you've seen evil with eyes wide open and you will heal.
one day you'll understand that everything that shines
brings death closer to you.

evenings, on the other hand, will please you here:
you are in the age of livid worlds,
half shadow, half unknown.
be welcome. here the future
has almost passed.

Ioan Es. Pop, **The Livid Worlds

Why hiding your fears in an unchewed No
Or sparkling your eyes just one liquid moment?
We are already tired before we begin.

En passant I have to tell you about the glue
That is cast upon our hips
scattered images in fugitive dreams
us at the same table
me waving good bye
perfume on your hands
but not enough laughter
to open some space in time

It’s noon and I miss you

my hand in your hand is jazz
the knot of our tender looks is poetry
and rage sometimes
all details germane,
this fluidity of desire passing through
the unexpected like sheets of rain
the kiss on my shoulder
the lightness of your soles
a love without name without shame is improvising
and you say come and I say round until I fall into your shadow
and when I fade away you open the door of a song
in my palms the forgotten synesthesia when
I listen to the intensity of cells, to the sacredness of dreams
I wear the boldness of the earth for you
I swear the freedom in the core of mirrors

there is so much night fallen under, in between, beside
the space is not enough to handle the burden of the living
the music refuse to surrender, grotesque
to givedeathsomethingtodo
each tiny thought fills the chamber of not-yet-thoughts
toomuchtobear
each idea splits into thousand others each minute
the mind is a rag, a broken doll watching this performance of power
l’elan vital
feelings ceaselessly running wild into each other,
crashing, colliding, stumbling blinded
calling their names
no redemption for light anywhere
crawling happens in all direction in the same time
until space it’s collapsing under its own weight
I slip through a dark visible hole attuned to the rhythm of hell
what an experience, the speed of blood refuses to freeze
terror is running to stand still
not enough connections
I practice some claws out of chaos
crammed with ******
the pain is unbearable all over
every inch is a battlefield
time has turned into the ghost of eternity
just a direction to flow, if only I could find
sing me a lullaby mama
so that I can make more space between my ears
lend me some grace
to ask death
to be gentle with me
only imagination breathes in
to steal some time alive
dreaming the touch of peacefulness
amid the stubbornness of heart

nospacenolight
this is how I became an expert
in pigeon’s flight
while insisting somehow
to keep my eyes inside
this is how I got some courage
to bear Yes & No in the dark
to keep writing when I die in myself
for love to find

the principle of uncertainty
when there were no corners
not yet
the energy of thought
preformed
the roots of leaves
preconditioned
the land of images without boundaries
I was the king of taste
this vessel took
changing forms
each minute
I was one with my hand
with my towels
with the red cube
of desire
I want was enough
to destroy
the names of dawn
this vessel knows the route to chaos
our guarding mother
take me in your sighs
hold me somewhere
in the sleeves
of thought
let's do it
let's feel one last bit
of the pulsing wreckage
we are full of promises we made
to ourselves
to take the route
to the next level
of ecstasy
we need a container
let's do it
let's chase the semantics
away
what remains is
the fruit of day

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.*
Leonard Cohen

the night birds
do want to be saved from light
in the land of whispers
the toll of complexity is
their unchanged lament
trapped between layers
insecure inside the semiotic square:
what is real?
true?
imaginary?
what is true and not true? – the call of destruction
this terror, the impossibility of meaning, shut inside the
drawer with plastic bags
we made my house there
somebody had to play the fool
these are reality games
recognition games
language games
with no key for the other’s syntax
who is the subject in this grave of flesh?
reality should be transactional
but the silence turned its face away instead
the clear bodies without voice rejoice
nobody asked the body how difficult it is to bear a mind
“we all know it’s not true & don’t you dare recognize it”
“you should be happy with your life & happiness doesn’t exist
(look at my poor body)”
“you are on your own & don’t you dare disobey”
“you must prove yourself & you are no good without us”

the right to reality was still not invented
since we are mostly busy deciphering our own language
words are self-fulfilling

I’m caring my annihilation safe
in the silence of nails
in the exhaustion of tools
of axes
and all the other love words

every man has his island,
his hiding places projected out loud
with blood power,
vernacular dreams &
ventriloquist voices.
among other things, madness -
an optical illusion
what you see is what you are
or seeing is believing
insideman and outsidemen
undifferentiated
the room has one view
on patched windows
indesire cutting deserted canyons
for the self-acclaimed King
(indesire wants nothing but to be,
to make room for islands in reality)

“be good, otherwise Haruka will come
to take you away, my child”
(what’s in a name
Haruka is “from far away”)
but children very rarely draw lines
caught in the furious chaotic circles of the world
now that every action has a reaction
reality principle is just a skin
holding the inside out & the outside in.

everyman has his island
of vexed fantasies
look into your eyes from outside in
before you see that fire
or anything else,
see this
-the beautiful war-

sunset's scream of gold, light exults
you betray yourself in depressive insults
the city's hollow tone echoing through flesh,
where life's dreams are made to mesh

unstable rhythms like a windless storm
no paradox, just pain, wounds in display
I fell for the burden, the taste of failure's bite,
the tremble of your fright
no need for final meanings or touches that pretend
love without desire, desire without love's bitter end

I told you: night gets shattered
when  darkness fades away

we fall, we run, we chase, we hide
make plans and make believes
we force our roots to ignore the cycles of decay
we fill our bodies with rush and dismay
we love and we are ready to die all
the symbolic deaths that ignore the traffic lights
just to just to just to just to
avoid the unbearable pain of being alive

kanso infuses my eyes
everywhere there
even in a deer
my heart recognised him
skipped a beat in overwhelm
the sacredness of the air
touched everything
the great temple
the red shrine
its emptiness
so vibrant
pure beauty
my atoms turned
into God's particle

something
in my heart
misses him
in the unseen
puzzle
surreal so
beautiful
and
so it is
kanso of the soul:
I kept on
dreaming
to be a deer
in Nara

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,'
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

from **Extravagaria

my hands are full of waves, walls, kisses, common faces
a shamanic design sometimes
but they still can't bear the weight of words
in a language without wrists

I am a Jane Doe on a metaphoric journey
cause time isn't waiting for me in particular
so I won't waste any more minute on the description
of the darkness of language
better start writing the memoirs of the time to come

a paradox, perhaps you'd say
imagination frees reality
what if it's the other way round:
reality frees imagination

my lips forget your ironies
waters feel your surrender
the rush hour of something ineffable knows
you are caressing the back of the light
your words are crispy and salty

I emigrate into a silence that keeps its promise
I'll learn your steps like the worm learns the apple
or the sea learns the depth

light learns colour from its carbon dreams

some waves just pass through me
I let them touch other surfaces
they got carried away by the breeze
or the lament of seaguls
my architecture or the scripture
no wonder the receptivity
but only if you feel the field
to understand the predator
merge with one
to understand a bird
feel the weightless air
to understand a flower
dream its sensitivity
to understand the ******* of dawn
let yourself be devoured
there is empty space
in the great chain of being
oh, how mimetic everything is
lust doesn't last, it isn't so obvious
nor the craving for shining surfaces
as an empty screaming in raw beats
it tastes like sand in the eyes to me

I can see more and more
the spinning of burned eyes
I won't let myself be
devoured by a false premise
no, no need no worries
beauty is the mother of
the night when
every wall shouts
our name
leave the door open
leave the seduction
to me

let your skin
surrender
to the labyrinth
untranslatable
let me be in love
with the sunstone
you'll find the right
melody
to leave beauty
unharmed

let me tell you stories about stories
let me touch you with the pure joy of touching,
the eclipse of emptiness or
spicy details on the trajectory of sight

some sorrows make for an obsession without identity

we can invent a sign language
for nobody else to understand
this unfinished text, the singularity of clarity,
the sweetness of fingers

no shame in shade
let me touch you with a heresy
haunted by silence

50 ways to wreck, get in line
Need to grow, have to push
Flicking through vinyl and feeding the rush
Kovacs

let's decenter love
crush it and mix it with pepper
let's put it in boxes and send them
to an uknown destination
let's caress our defeated hands
til they willingly remember
skin's magnetic charge, the magma of darkness

let's asphixiate the air till no longer tolerates words
excavate the emptiness, two fossils washed by rain our hearts
unbearable the silence hidden in the middle of teeth

let's not do impossible things like two acrobats of the invisible
certainties implode like stars' collapse into the ***** of space
your confetti smile, this brutal beauty of longing
let's stop counting days, stay resonant instead
we are a fleeting sorcery in a dyzzing endless pace

some days I can't help wondering what would
Anna Karenina say to madame Bovary
let's say they exchange ruminations, decide the future of clouds,
wonder if memory works like the fossils trapped in sand beds
ask one another what lipstick colour is trendy this year in Paris, Milan or Madrid
argue over their genesis, who is the winner
mind heart bone tissue trapped together
no, not sure about their order in a female lineage
do they descend from the Great Mother or
were they born from the head of Zeus
talk about anything but love: moonless nights, Kafka,
the purpose of life, the fragility of leaves, Victorian women
Madame dreams of Freud, Anna knows Darwin
contrary to their inbuilt frame of reference they wait for a fresh dawn,
touch their bodies with female eagerness.
behind their eyes love's net is heavy with meaning

“their mental state contains something lethal:
past, nothing but past” Nikolay Y Ossipov

you measured your height
with the mountains
your fists with the howl
of lonely wolves
to avoid helplessness stupidity confusion:
the all too encompassing human nature

I no longer want to keep you
in the alternative dimension
guarding your wholeness
I'll let you fall into pieces
I'll let you die the death destined
to you
instead of crushing him
or imploding myself
for him to rearrange his fragments
for me to hope for all the levels
of coherence
I/we are capable of

bodies afraid or in love are the most intense
I want my body back
from your battlefield of delusions
your pain is not my pain
your despair is not mine
your manic refusal of touch
is still my manic capacity
to love wounds tragedies
aborted laughter
some words are mirrors
I'll keep writing to you
till there is no escape
from the clarity
of dawn:
all my love is of
no real use
to you

"Science and art are like arms and heart. So many accidents of meaning, art is in heart, and so is hear, ear, art as a form of heart hearing."
Michael Eigen

I didn't want to open that door
nevertheless life did it for me
residues of this old combustion
pits of rage you're carring
for their perfumed names
humiliation at every corner of the street
suspicion of the sunrise

I remember or maybe I dreamt it
two sons looking for their father
he chose other walls full of zest
holy days were a laughter
indiference for the son rise

how chalenging to be a man hiding vulnerability
there was no one to show you how to
keep the balance of seeing and feeling and forgetting
there was no one to show me my edges
for good Gods to dwell and feast on life unhindered

the poetry of others dissolves me with words like butterflies smashing themselves against solitary windows. flashes of liberty and my grandma's preserve jars get illuminated.
poetry must be freedom, stubborn love-spell. to be in love with your time.
poetry connects me with  the invisible light in my worn out nails - the other me, you and you and him. keep caressing the back of non-existence, the day is new and I'm whistling.
soluble time: poetry or the veneration of the unknown in every word: lover, dawn, pain, bread, together, hatred
let your words be honest, imprudent, rebellious, ET
let your words be

you light a match
the flame forgets
I close my eyes
echoes pass through us
I can't tell, is it
a mirror or a door
we are suspended in shapes
that keep on crying

it must have been light
that invented my mind
the light terrorizing my eyes so
that I walk obsessed by beauty
I am trapped inside the circles of time
they grow and revolve in my tissues
it must have been love like a pocket of darkness
like the gravity that is so simple
that we can't understand

Or you, father, pointing down to a Sicilian harbour ―
its dark pincers compressing an eye-glass
of water

Or my skin, watered down by a lifetime out of your sun
yet thick and dark through our blood’s long curing
in white light

Or your silhouette, insect-strange on the black breast
of a Northumbrian hill, our kinship of shape lost
in the white flood-down
of summer

Or that sequoia glade whose green we drank: a tall glass
where dark sank as heavier spirits do, and stirred leaves
made a white effervescence
of sunlight

Or you, black and white, slumped in that wicker chair
mourning your father, steeped in a kitchen’s shadowless
fluorescence, toe-caps scuffed grey
by the glare

Or rain, elsewhere, as white horizons laddered with dark ―
rain as fault-lines slanting the light ― till, here, resolve
the first cold drops, steaming on your curved
back of earth

Mario Petrucci from *Flowers of Sulphur

the skyscape is flowing so naturally over our heads
the light brings alive shadowy sonatas over the hills
each hour the tone of its intensity is changing
such immensity for gentleness
I can't help but woder if a purpose of life is
the sense of beauty

I feel like a poet again as
I'm standing in front of this window
it is full of ivy and ripples of quietness
life has certain rhymes and some riddles
I'm thinking about lovers exchanging
spontaneous glances, words, illusions
I'm thinking about social workers
returning home with a tired smile
I'm thinking about young and old
carrying different worlds under their skin

I feel like a poet again as I wait for the hours
to ripen for more truth to tell
a round whiteness  an exultant blackness
embrace the window

let me listen to you
your hidden landscapes
your lives lost
in velvety oblivion

listen to the streams of blood
throbbing at your wrist
in the tender flesh inside your elbow

listen to the vulnerable intensity
in the soft vale at your collarbone

the silence on your lips
the whirls below

listen
listen through you
to these things that one cannot speak

by Ioana Ieronim from Ariadne's Veil

let me listen to you
your hidden landscapes
your lives lost
in velvety oblivion

listen to the streams of blood
throbbing at your wrist
in the tender flesh inside your elbow

listen to the vulnerable intensity
in the soft vale at your collarbone

the silence on your lips
the whirls below

listen
listen through you
to these things that one cannot speak

**Ioana Ieronim

read these lines
slowly

let them blow your foliage apart
find your forsaken paths
arrest you
in the whisper of the story before story

cover your feet like freshly mown grass
like the fresh foam of milk
in the dim light
before daybreak

do read
these lines
slowly
locked in their letters and tendrils

as if
an embrace

**Ioana Ieronim

when the night finds its resonant frequency
my heart feels like a compass I let her find the scent of your body
let's get lost my hands would say
and let no wind find us and let no why and no road find us
my face illuminated by the song of birds
your face illuminated by the laziness of a sea that only we can see
let's get lost so  we can find each other
in the archive of veins

I know this woman well
from the curl of days
each day I write
a love letter to life
I strive to allow anything as
it is unfolds emerges
aliveness deadness blindness
foolishness fright ignite
the gloaming of thought
the expiration date for
the hade of dreams
I welcome every pain with a smile,
white hair and a glass of wine

this kind of love nested
in the voicelessness
of uncanny zoons
hues tunes lagoons
in the silence of soles
when you step so carrefully
not to disturb the unformed truths

pain love, neighbours
in the flow of synonyms
they taught myself to me -
the density of ribs
the depth of skin
the electricity of muscles
the tautology of heart
the logorrhea of thought
the temptation of beauty

moon is to blame
it hid its unforseen tales
inside the blueprints of
songs under the skin

I sought to be loved,
But no one was there.
Day after day my heart ached;
I longed to share my passion.

One starless winter night,
My heart gave up.
It went empty and cold;
Life had no meaning.

Hatred washed over me,
Like a wave
Over a sunlit rock pool.
My thirst for love had gone.

My desire had evaporated.
I know my yearning will never be satisfied;
I will continue with my life,
A slave to hatred.

Francis (aged 12 years)
from *New Families, Old Scripts

nights taste like earth and I pray to the god of grass
when I look at you I wonder if the stars remember their combustion
I wonder if the stones have cried out their lunacy
and who and what will remember
who will know of my
biography
I have only the feelings, their broken cycles in my body
my hands resemble a tree
they're caressing themselves too much in the wind
our fear is not an imaginary cage or an ego shaken by shivers

sometimes
you're tired of love like a marathon runner.
It's good, you say to yourself, when the walls are silent
when you're not ankle deep in doubt
I love you the best I can and that's a trivial fact
like an empty street where no one remembers the meaning of sadness

when I watch you dwell sometimes outside your skin it's hard to keep my tears in balance
then you turn around and your body knows the meaning of tenderness as the morning knows the promises of an edge, of a forgotten soul or maybe of a lunacy unheeded

I am myself
in his encircled silence
lust doesn’t last
only love can travel
with the speed of light

only love can unravel
the colors of time
expose
the silent paradox
of gravity:
to be falling
when you’re flying

falling
deeper
into yourself
while you
elevate
in another

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

finding our way back again. to what? this is a steep question. I am drawing this map of words, today we should speak of what is, the roots of words, this silence their soil, these words vehicle for the inexpressible.  Gaza strip, day 52, Jordan foreign ministery says Israel is busy with genocide. what else is trully new, for sure not pain, a fundamental law unrecognized by physics. the paradox of time that goes deeper into words when we feel them. the center cannot support itself exposed in cruel eyes. fall and rise of a time we lived in sometime like in a house with no windows. reality is and is not in the same spacetime simply unreachable, untraceable, incomprehensible. someone speaks in a low voice, another speaks more with the eyebrows. the door opens to the dance of life, and who is riding the dance. brave minds and collapsed bodies, I didn't want to be here today, she says. one feels disgusted by the expulsion from eden. I am looking for the secret garden where the mind of the body grows, but I don't know it. I am looking for a theory of absence. this is a story about the impossibility of story.  we have to listen and forget so that life goes on

and it was dark inside the wolf or so she said, Margaret. it haunted me gently. the blazing light was feeding on darkness, as always. we were only creatures made of words that come and go leaving behind their trace of mistery. we need something to believe in cause we need something to trust. where to find it? let's believe in pain and in the art of letting go, I wanted to shout. pain  mixed with fear, a hiding pain, a pain from which I wanted to hide, a punishing pain, a muted scream, a helplessness, a circus, a charade, a make believe. what if we were fools, we were empty because of being too full. where is the group, the vitality of our communities. children don't have a sense of future, only the infinite present for not feeling like a human. let's not pretend, let's not fool the world with our orderly words

there’s still some music hidden
in the burst of noon
I can feel it in my lips
the Man you are
you ****** time
when you forget to blink

make me your Woman
embodied certainty
doorstep within
pillow for dreams
uninterrupted

I’ll be your road back
into childhood laughter
fill me with poetry, commonplace,
raw matter-of-fact
I’ll wear the day for you
fix little surprise
in the cup of tea
let you play true love
with my heels, dormant

twist the mirror inwards:
I’m yours.
you stranger,
behold thy Woman

maybe the earth knows or
the body knows first
what he or she dares
immersed in sunsets
and adverbs
lions make themselves
prey in blue windows
outside the fle/ash  of words
the verbs of the world
inside a shepherd whistles
a love song
to the sweetness of grass

Of patience, I know only
what sea turtles have taught me:
how they are born on lightless
beaches so the moon can serve
as a beacon to lure them
into the water; how they spend
their whole lives trying to swim
towards it, enamored, obsessed;
how they flap their forelimbs,
a vague recollection of flying -
the right movement in the wrong
medium, as if they knew how
to reach the moon in a former life
but now only remember the useless
persistent motions; how if you cut
one's heart out it would keep
beating in the pit of your palm,
recognizing the cold night air.

by Ariel Francisco from Best New Poets 2016 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

familiar this bubble of emptiness
comfortable as a womb
pain plays hide and seek
my hands are free to write
this hybrid creature that is me
fantasy and reality share a reciprocity
I am metabolized by my dreams and so I become
the aperture of the heart open as ever
to catch the murmuration of silence
of longing and forgetting
circles inside echoes inside circles

we didn't invent love
love invented us

mama told me:
minodora, stop thinking about sam
when you go to the market
think of bacon, think of cabbage
be a proper woman
what would have been, i asked her
if beethoven hadn’t always had a bird
singing in his head?
yeah but beethoven, mama said
picking up the dust rag
and starting to clean the genius’s ears
and that’s only because i must
write about you
the same way i must sneeze
or yawn
i dreamt of you last night
you had a baby with a cat’s head
he was cute as a button
you were screaming your head off
‘come see what a tumbling rock
has to go through to reach a beautiful stillness’
it’s a big deal
when you forget to cross yourself
before going to sleep

Nora Iuga translated by Diana Manole and Adam Sorkin

it's got to be the right time
the right one for the
trance of dance
of crying
of love
or prayer
stay awhile to feel
the breath of hours
or the pilgrims breathing
near darkening forests
zebras forgetting their
blackness
the pulse of far riders
blown away
by a mirage caravan

blessed those who
pray for the calmness
of rain

I wear my nails like a mischief
but I ask them deep questions
spring comes in the middle of winter without innuendo,
no twist of words just plain daylight
I smile at everything that smiles back at me
I listen to this ancient heart
I contemplate the transgressor in me
then I move on to stand up comedy
(life could be unbearable without laughter)
I conjure words to write themselves
especially when I feel there is too much of an I,
or like a snowdrop in January

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

A sign we are, without meaning
Without pain we are and have nearly
Lost our language in foreign lands,
For when the heavens quarrel
Over humans and moons proceed
In force, the sea
Speaks out and rivers must find
Their way. But there is One,
Without doubt, who
Can change this any day. He needs
No law. The rustle of leaf and then the sway of oaks
Besides glaciers. Not everything
Is in the power of the gods. Mortals would sooner
Reach toward the abyss. With them
The echo turns. Though the time
Be long, truth
Will come to pass.

But what we love?  We see sunshine
On the floor and motes of dust
And the shadows of our native woods and smoke
Blooms from rooftops, at peace beside
Turrets' ancient crowns; for the signs
Of day are good if a god has scarred
The  soul in response.
Snow like lilies of the valley,
Signifying a site
Of nobility, half gleams
With the green of the Alpine meadow
Where, talking of a wayside cross
Commemorating the dead,
A traveler climbs in a rage,
Sharing distant premonitions with
The other, but what is this?

By the figtree
My Achilles died
And Ajax lies
By the grottoes of the sea,
By streams, with Scamandros as neighbor.
In the persisting tradition of Salamis,
Great Ajax died
Of the roar in his temples
And on foreign soil, unlike
Patroclos, dead in king's armor. And many
Others also died. On Kithairon
Lay Eleutherai, city of Mnemosyne. And when
God cast off his cloak, the darkness came to cut
Her lock of hair. For the gods grow
Indignant if a man
Not gather himself to save
His soul, yet he has no choice; like-
Wise, mourning is in error.

Friedrich Holderlin
translated by Richard Sieburth

this morning when I opened my eyes
the light was breathing the window had a pulse
as if I was a body with unmystified senses
as if I could see deeper in everything that surrounds me
perhaps a remembrance of how
difficult it was for me to be in the world
with an immense sensitivity to the slightest movement of life around me,
how wondeful to attune to the wind, the leaves, the cacophony of beautiful words and deeds, the harmony in the blinking of strangers, the sway of steps on the streets, the collapse of the waveforms of dreams that we called reality
how hard to have a mind that might understand eventually that truth is complicated or not for every creature on the walks of life.
my essence is vulnerability my strenghts is my weakness for my foolishness there is no cure
don't have to look in the mirror to recognize
my human face, your human face, their faces
late in the night when I close my eyes I see only people, the beauty of the world, the cosmos created through pain, how
the morning of the day I was born was there, and everything was already breathing before me and everything will be still spinning its mystery when this excess of life will rob a last breath from me. I know I will be watching the breath of light, how everything gets illuminated when the time is ripe

The mourning is
about it never being
the way I needed
it to be.

My life itself a
disturbance of mourning

Stands in my life. Before me. The
dead girl under the bed
her skin transparent as mine

disappears. I come out
and there is no mother. Sometimes
she appears and there is no telling what
attracts her warmth. Approaches and departs.
Becomes desire,
the loot of her mourning.

Empty womb pillow. I am not
enrapt. Its’ tufts flap my fringe.
Behind me, at my sides
stands mourning.

I have only to be busy with your burial.
Sharpening flint to a pillar
pile to a mound
and turn from it.

It is gone
forever.
And I am.

By Noa Vardi, M. D.

this intensity: I rediscover
the edge of falling into oneself,
reinventing reality,
pain, blind feathers, sharp teeth, limits
this deficit  of whispering
thoughts can see their end,  their imaginary double
the roots of words translucent
their feedom released
they dismantle non words,
half-truths or nontruth
birds are free to be birds
or dreams of the air
hunger for connection is a hunger for creation
this feeling a vital movement, an undercurrent hallucinating forests
a delicate complexity of vulnerability and necessary innocence
the forgetting is colourless, as a matter of fact
there is no true forgetting, but nature itself invented
a God of mercy