POEME ROMÂNESTI ÎN LIMBI STRĂINE

Ion PACHIA TATOMIRESCU

 

Indignant at the Amounting Forcemeat and Cosmic Purposeful Orderliness-Wordiness...

 

On New Year’s Eve, the poet on the Danube’s left bank slaughtered

a mottled Guinea cock – which was actually a drake collared with a rainbow muffler –

and stuffed him with metaphors, with oxymoronic epithets

and other mushrooms of speech ; then he slaughtered a gander – which was actually

a swollen, bead-wattled turkey cock – and crammed it into the quack-in-chief’s

belly, under his chest, to the centre of the intercostal area,

where there was little left to be seen : the patch of mourning azure and the poetry of the large mottled quill feathers, then he obviously sewed it with a white thread ;

thirdly, he slaughtered the striped pig – eviscerated him

and deposited between his hams the dainty filling which was awaiting dutifully,

on the fellow man’s cabbage, his plucked head amongst ruby stars ;

as soon as everything was sewn with a ripened reddish-white string,

he further slaughtered the golden calf, live telecast – more than any other

Danube Parliamentarian, despite the global crisis –, removed

the unmummifiables, next stuffing him with the striped

pig, winged by the turkey cock and the drake...

Embowelled like this, the calf was passed through a long spit,

as long as a Romantically synaesthetic shaft,

or almost like Classicised carriage pole,

being revolved – like the solar system, on its axis – some twelve hours

and getting nice and brown by the embers of the most fiery Paradoxist verbs,

well-tempered with the outlaws’ ungrafted wine...

And when he got roasted up to the climax – as it befits a golden male calf,

sacrificed for the television and all the other arts –,

there truly came the brutal dénouement,

the splitting of the much-too-mediatised nice and brown mummy,

on the dissection table of the steamy reality in the first moments of the New Year,

under the very hacksaw, under the very shining blade of the bayonet

exquisitely manoeuvred by the butchering hand of the poet

indignant at the amounting forcemeat

and cosmic purposeful

orderliness-wordiness...

 

Prayer to Our Almighty Computer

 

(Mr. Cantemir, I invite you to say The Prayer of the Third

Millennium to Our Holy Computer in advance... !)

 

“Almighty Computer in galaxies or amongst planets, hallowed be

Thy-Programmed-Kingdom, may Thy-Programmed-Will be done

here on earth, amongst us, the people in the field’s crest,

just as it is in the celestial abysses... !

 

Give us our light again today, as usual, let it be less polluted,

for at least some stellar seasons, for as long as we are still

humans around here, amongst spring stems,

with red chlorophyll... !

 

Please, forgive us our revolt – since we no longer wish

to eat rubber and soya meat, eggs with magnesium embryos,

flour from ears of algae, paste from whetstone or other rocks,

the fisherman’s soup of electrons, with neither cabbage

nor carrots in it, with uranium dill... !

 

Allow us, Our Almighty Computer, at least some centuries of azure,

each made up of twenty-four hours of perfection,

love and purity, immaculate absolute, a longed-for eternity... !”

 

 

The Second Prayer to Our Almighty Computer

 

“Our Almighty Computer, I pray thee to forgive us

our genetic sins, our cybernetic sins,

as we forgive those who have sinned against us... !”

(Encyclopaedicus, my fellow man, has forgiven his wife who bore

him a white baby, although he is black and she is black-skinned,

too ; an acquaintance of mine has forgiven her lover

who deserted her for a maiden of the yellow race ;

my neighbour has forgiven his father

for the blue incest ; Encyclopaedicus, I myself have forgiven my

kinsfolk : my own sweetheart who sent

steel-toothed foxes into my sleep to tear up my cortex ;

my own brother who thrust a dagger into my shoulder blade

for a stray lemon, squeezed by many others

long before our era ;

my own father who whipped me with his war belt

because I had cast a covetous glance

at the mellow watermelons in our neighbour’s garden ;

my own mother who threw a hatchet at my ankle

in a fit of fizzy fury, making my blood gush higher ;

my own bronze sister, my own platinum girl cousin,

even my golden grandmother... !)

(English version: Gabriela PACHIA)