The poetic impressions – The Eleven Response

Violeta mi-a făcut o bucurie: mi-a tradus textul ăsta şi probabil că vor urma şi altele. Îi mulţumesc ei şi Domnului care i-a pus pe inimă să facă asta.

Poetic impressions
The Eleven Response

How can you measure the darkness?

It depends what each understands by „darkness”. Could be that place the light starts or could be that place it vanishes. Most are afraid of something they always see in shadow, at least in a shadow. Something it looks like despair. They forget the darkness never overcame the light!
TS:
How can you measure the darkness?
IP:
I measure with a candle unbounded rooms
My soul drags its empty treading
Step by step it breaks the light away from the mirror
It is the only one who measures the night in the defeated scream.

***

I pushed the darkness off and dragged closer to me
The morning wink, the wagon jarred over the strawberry hill
They were asking me how I could keep this smooth descendent road
I was impassively sought for the sap under the shell of a locust branch
It was dark and I couldn’t see its pulse
When that high locust lost all its thoughts except the last one
That moment I found how the wind blows over it days and nights
Nor in dark nor in the light I found it never hurts
The blowing wind dispersed its bitter flowers
I chewed them to learn how the sap shines because of so many bees

Trecerea prin icoană (fragment 01) + English version

***

când cerul ţi-e atât de înalt
înseamnă că ai aripi
dacă e atât de albastru
înseamnă că ştii ce să faci cu ele

nu-mi spune
după norii ăia nu e nimic
nimic altceva decat Dumnezeu

Iată şi versiunea în limba engleză, traducere Andreea Luncan: 

***

When you sky is so high
you surely have wings
if the sky is so blue
you surely know with your wings what to do

Don’t tell me
There’s nothing else beyond those clouds
Absolutely nothing but God.

(Translated by Andreea Luncan)

When the words start to love

With one word, or maybe only with its edge
I hit the air in the poplar’s leaves
and several times I surrounded its green
and all its nests I filled
with multi-colored birds, and naked baby birds
so that each letter in the alphabet could understand its neighbor.

And then, everything was whistling with meaning – like a train
heading to its final destination.
Everything was vibrating
in the silence that follows the meaning.
And I was thinking, thinking aloud
in the voice of each single letter
straight and firm like the axle which splits
the forest, like the sword of a night between years.

Until it hurt, until it hurt I rummaged around
until I named every bent of the shadow
in its way to the heart, until I was beginning
to be clothed in poem, to be dressed up
for the wedding at which they – the angels – will see,
whom they took care of all along.

So it was getting lighter when I touched the sky with a word
or maybe only with its edge. Up the heart’s stairs
the King was climbing
saving those on his right and left and front and back
with a cosmic gesture – like a cross
rising up in the incandescent sunset.
That’s how I have learned to be awake when the words
start to love.

Translated by Andreea Luncan

From „The peace between two silences” – 2004

versiunea românească

The theme of tomorrow’s heart

To my daughter Rebecca, at her ninth birthday

Today the snow has sung in a tinkling
and from all the day’s butterflies the fly sprang out to take a walk.
The shadow’s baby goats have no horns yet
and their gently playing does not remind one
of wolves and dangerous steeps. I want my mom
and Jesus takes my hand and takes me to her.
Full of flowers, the stairs are sill growing, step by step,
and no one knows yet why my eyes are blue.

I’d like to wish myself „Happy birthday” and I’d like
the whole world to do just the same but the world’s not all mine
so I wait for the bus to leave and cross the street.
Neither the street and nor the playground are all mine
but the playground’s joy surely is.
And so is the place next to my bed:
there I go to sleep after I pray for mummy and daddy.
And for the bread and for my teddy bear.

Dear Lord Jesus, why do the grown-ups have dayaches?
Please, make at least my birthday not to hurt and make it sunny
so that I can play! My steps are still small,
they don’t not match mummy’s steps
when we walk through the snow, yes
mine are somewhat silent.
But look, the spring is coming
and everything is melting.
Just like when Jesus’s coming, isn’t it?

Translated by Andreea Luncan

(vezi versiunea în româneşte)

The pictures

My picture and your picture on this bulletin board of silence. Just look: this is me and this is you. And we have wings, do you see? The wings of faith. Though our pictures have been recently posted, God took them in eternity. They are seen from all sides and all places for God is every place. His eyes are everywhere. There is no color missing there is no color that shouldn’t be there.
His camera’s brand name is „Golgota”. God takes a picture of anyone who goes there to rest in the shadow of his son’s cross. These are pictures of people with wings. For now we have become able to fly. And we are flying over the dirt of this world without getting stained. The albatrosses are part of a landscape with sea but they are neither the landscape, nor the sea, just like we are in the world but we are no longer from the world, nor are we the world.
What beautiful memories are held in these pictures! Oh, come and see: this is when we were saved! Look at us turning whiter than snow through the blood of the Lamb. And look at us here at the throne of grace, oh, and here fighting the enemy. And this, this is the sword of the Spirit. I’ll never forget the joy of God’s flash shining over me. I’ll never have enough of flying.
Oh, Lord, let’s look at those pictures again!

Translated by Andreea Luncan

Prayer was falling on a platform

in memory of the poet Ioan Alexandru

It wasn’t winter, it was no winter at all…
Maybe only cold people whitening their eyes towards you.
And their eyes were turning into long icicles aimed at you.
I didn’t even know what to tell you first:
melt them, face them the blaze of your heart.
But you were writing a poem on a platform.
Just like a passenger taking out his ticket, you made up yours.

Like in a dream, it was a bit of evening and it seemed
we had actually arrived somewhere: “Let’s stop!” you said
untying your hands in a prayer. “I will go no farther.
The world is heavy and the letters have tired.”
And the light was running dry all around,
the station was running dry of wagons
and the seconds were draining in the big blind clock.
I remembered the silence applauding
and saw angles walking all around you.
It wasn’t winter, it was no winter at all.

You worked, getting in and out the house of bread –
it was there that you kept your words.
But this wasn’t very easy to see
for there was so much smoke, there were so many people
in the station. And none had time to check your ticket.
They just grabbed a crust of bread and left,
with your prayers humming all around them like a swarm of bees.
There was a short winged waiting awaiting for you
and the roar of the hour slowly turned into silence.

There was an ocean under your feet, an ocean
growing deeper and deeper, with a multitude of sentences in it.
Some were like condors others like seagulls.
They were coming after your love. Who said
you were in a railway station? “How many are we?” you asked.
“Well, it’s you and him and him and…Me” came the answer.
“This is good!” you said. And it was evening, always evening;
day after day, hour after hour, it was evening.
“In the evening, I pray.”
And the snow began to fall on the platform.
No, it wasn’t winter. It was no winter at all.

Translated by Andreea Luncan

From „The Kingdom’s Windows” (2006)

***
I like October by accidents.
How do the invertebrates dream in Autumn?
I looked at my watch,
then I cut off the green out of the leaves
and the cathedrals out of the wind,
just for my sake.

You can believe whatever you want.
When the sun is rising in October,
it steps into accidents first
and calls them by their names,
then I like it.
Isn’t it so, Lord?

***
Yes,
a nameless quietness fills up the frontiers
within which my unworthiness cries out.
Maybe that’s why I tell my name to it
when I wish no more
we were together
or when I tire
to bear myself.

With my own hands
maybe I gather what’s left
of the shiver of the aspen tree,
every evening.
I open the box with hearts
to look for mine inside
and I cannot find it,
and I know not
what it is that hurts.

My Lord,
last night I was wearing mysterious pyjamas,
while I was dreaming blue angels
and breaking the wine
into thousands of thorns,
into thousands of wounds,
into thousands of bread pieces,
into the transient thousands.

Translated by Camelia Luncan

From „With face to cross” (1994)

***
If you’re tired of reading just go home.
It’s late and you haven’t yet bought meat and bread and vegetables
or tears for the existential dressings.
How false the day is when it ends as if it had been something other
than a chapel where you forgot to take off your hat
and someone pulled you discreetly aside
“Mr., please, you know. . .!”

The false day, lived as if by another
more stupid, more lazy than you
who has usurped your name, your body, your feelings.

Translated by Camelia and Andreea Luncan (with suggestions in English by Luci Shaw and Jeanne Murray Walker)

***
At the edge of the world
called neighborhood a petal
is crying for water
a kid has lost his cap
the future stopped working
somewhere between
tomorrow and the rest of them.

***
On the expecting sidewalk
the garland of the cross is growing
you pick it up and slowly
it becomes all that you have
and you don’t understand
how come so suddenly
the sky has cleared.

***
Without knowing I crossed over an angel tonight
my shoulders are white and soft
with his wings. Tonight I’m another
and the palm of the cross drops a tear
on everything. And all the things walk slowly,
and are almost talking to one another.

***

Look the temptations are marching
through the capital of my sight
they are enticing, so alive and so transparent that
you could almost see through them
prince atom beheading the poems.

***
And it’s like I put on a new
conselation each morning
when I go to take the tram
tugging at my shirt
as if it were a vision of heaven.

Translated by Andreea Luncan