Petre GOT
Signs
Death is another kind of life,
Life – another kind of death.
What brings them together?
What separates them?
On this egg called Earth,
Do I really exist
Or is it but a dream
The fact that I exist?
I watch the sky’s iconostasis with no greed,
The trees struggle, they speak to me,
I beseech, You, My Lord, to take me away like a leaf
So that I’ll see no longer the hideous earthly scenario!
The chameleons and the hyenes besiege me,
The day is night, the night is day.
The hideous crow pretends to be a nightingale.
The verb to love burns in the crematoria.
Tide
Forest, forest, take my heart
Turn it into a leaf
To play in the wind.
River, river, take my thought,
Turn it into a wave
To speak to the waking stars.
Mountain, brother mountain,
Rock my longing,
Turn it into the healing tide,
Nightingales and skylarks and blackbirds
To burn divinely.
Father, make my soul
Rise to You,
I feel crucified.
Dilemma
I break away from myself
As the snake sloughs its old skin.
Early tear, tremor
In the eye of the rose,
Vowel of the talkative mountain river,
Scent of the tender holy oil.
I made a halt under the sky and I saw.
My Lord, bitter is the presence’s taste
The dream of the increated being might seem sweet.
The new-comers in the instant,
Do they cry out with fear
For the world they come into?
Leaving I’ll have my eyes misty
Not because I leave,
I’ll shed tears because I was bound to be.
Sigh for my passage through the wilderness.
Father, I am the tragic son,
The apprentice that contradicts his Master.
Will I be saved, will be my gesture forgiven?
I wish I had came out
In a mysterious starry meadow,
So that I may have welcomed You alone,
Guest unique and rare,
Among the dances of the butterflies,
Among the weddings of the bees.
Prayer
My Lord, why am I bound to bear my clay
As a stone, as a tent
In the course of the years and the seconds, high and low?
I show up before You, I, the inept,
With my dorsal side, my phallus,
When I wished to come differently:
A spring, a rainbow, a lily.
I wished to emerge at noon:
The flight of the azure, a tender beam.
Were you tired or unwilling
To make me?
You blended so much
Gob, scent, light.
Forgive me, maybe you think
You might make us differently;
Void of the pitch darkness within us,
Void of pains, void of mire.
I pray to You, Our Master, for one thing alone:
Spare me a moment so that You may hear my words..
Traduceri de Olimpia Iacob
(din volumul Vocale Celeste, Editura
Dacia, Cluj- Napoca, 2001)