POEME ROMÂNESTI ÎN LIMBI STRĂINE

Paulina POPA

 

THE IORDANIA BOOK

 

XXXII

FROM AMONG THE LINES

I let the dove fly.

It carried the salt of the world.

Beads of salt fell down in Betania.

 

With my soul wrapped like an baby

I approached the Jordan River.

Hungry, I bent over it.

 

One could hear the footsteps of Jesus pass by.

 

I did not wear the ring

when I took water out of the Jordan.

 

The rust on the body fell

together with the beads of salt.

They shone on the surface of the water.

Maybe I spoke too much

and the sky took vengerance

covering me with

A sheet of copper.

 

XXXIII

A SHEET OF COPPER

envelops me, ties my hands together.

 

I said,

‘this be the arm of the day brought up to the forehead,

be its fat child,

who wants to fall asleep,

or howls terribly,

restoring our relation with the night.’

I said,

‘a poem is written

only in the street of the word,

terrible and meandering.’

A poem that holds us,

covers our mouths

so as not to speak more than we are permitted,

wretched as we are

following the footsteps of God,

to the water of the Jordan.

 

I said,

‘a poem is written with the love

with which we love our fellow-creatures.

With the same love the poem writes to us,

words about the glory of God,

He who passes over the water, is baptized…’

 

I stood stockstill.

Behold, the tears of salt.

The sheet of copper melts

In my prayers.

 

Amen!

XXXIV

AMEN !

I cry out.

 

There was mud in my poems.

When I went into their water

there came out smoky circles

that ran through my blood

with all their scares.

 

Sometimes I caught the blood in my body

as if I had caught a butterfly.

I sent it away from the mud

that grew hard on my hands like gypsum

every year.

 

I struggle quickly

between the margins of this mud

that induces my sleep

and the world which my memory intuits.

And all that

for fear that the feelings

that come and bite at the poem,

one by one,

should do a new mass

in the Holy Places,

at the water of the Jordan River ,

 

different from the one in which God

comes down

 

in the chalice on the table

in the altar of the Holy of Holies.

XXXV

THE CHALICE ON THE TABLE
IN THE ALTAR
OF THE HOLY OF HOLIES

shines with such power

that I breathe it

here,

on the bank of the Jordan River.

 

I have neither hands loaded with gold,

nor books around me

to allure me.

There come only the poems,

the words, the sounds

and the sky above

without the ashes of the years.

The water of the Jordan River comes to me

like some angel-infants.

 

The guide breaks the silence,

 

From here you can take holy water…

There you can see the mount of the temptation…

The church is covered with gold――a donation

from the senate of Russia…

 

The guide awoke me

just as the water of the Jordan River

came up to me

like some angel-infants.

XXXVI

 

LIKE SOME ANGELS-INFANTS

I went deeper into the colours

ever clearer

of the Heaven.

 

I had forgotten the systems

that brought us together,

and moved us away for ever.

 

I had forgotten about the attraction of the matter,

the one of the night,

come with us,

after everybody’s capacity of rejection.

 

I had forgotten the explosion of flesh, tired and sick,

the re-examination

of our germination possibilities.

 

I had forgotten all,

except for the questions

that did not arise from my shadow.

 

I could see how things

perfectly matched my feelings,

and harmonized exactly with the landscape.

 

I saw how the dead buried their dead,

and the bounds between flesh and the shell of the soul

were free.

 

I did not yield to temptations,

but I asked myself

all the questions of my kin.

 

Then

for three days,

I kept quiet, I listened and I cried.

 

XXXVII

 

I KEPT QUIET

I LISTENED AND I CRIED,

crossing carefully

the Land of Moab and the land of the Ammonites.

 

Here is the genesis of all things.

 

An arid journey

through the history of these places

would have been of no help to me,

if God’s angel

had not made a circle around.

 

I cannot prove

that for three hours

I kept quiet, I listened and I cried,

getting free from the chains of the sensations,

at plus 45 degrees,

in the Garden of Heaven,

where the serpent gave the apple to Adam.

The bread is baked at great pains by his bones,

and generations of people without memories,

with lost melancholies

with piles of soiled rags

send picture postcards from afar.

 

I was quiet,

I listened and I cried for three hours,

greeting by making a bow up to the earth,

all the spiritual victories

that made me sad during

the 52 years .

 

XXXVIII

TO THOSE 52 YEARS

someone whispers,

and I listen and I can see

all that I could have seen

In the land of Moab.

I had to write the poem,

the one that had written me,

destroying with a specific tenderness

all the screens through which

people were gazing at me.

 

The poem had to write me,

to come into my privacy,

to sit down on the sofa,

to tell me how cold it was

in the world where I had anticipated the cold

and had hung thick curtains before the windows.

 

To love me,

to leave me all by myself.

The narrow places are not for it….

I whisper to the 52 years

about all I have looked at and all that has looked at me

taking me along with them

 

in the land of Moab.

 

XXXIX

IN THE LAND OF MOAB

the poem embraced me.

 

Everywhere

as in a bed where we made love

there came down a special music.

 

Then I caressed my poem,

and I took out a knife,

I cut a plait of its hair,

to bear it about me.

 

For a while

it was clear that its love

was endless.

 

I took it along with me

I was within it

and spread on

 

Its seed

wherever I passed by.

 

I troubled the joy of my poem

when I combed my hair

in the land of Moab

and I did not care

about the customs of this land

and the blue biographies

we risked to be caught by.

 

Nothing of what matters for mortals

meant anything to me.

 

I made things be harder

when I felt my shoulders

caught by the body of the poem

 

And we were no longer alone

by the Water of the Jordan .

 

Traduceri de Olimpia Iacob si Jim KACIAN