I hid myself into a shell, on the bottom of the ocean
But I forgot in which one.

Every day I go down in deep waters
And I strain the water through my fingers
To find myself.

Sometimes I think
That a huge fish ate me
And now I am looking for him everywhere
To help him swallow me completely.

The bottom of the sea lures and frightens me
With millions of semblable shells.

Kinsmen, I am hidden in one of them
But I don’t know in which one.

How many times I went straight to one of them
Telling her: „That’s me”,
But when I opened the shell
It was empty.
 

SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare composed in seven days.

On the first day he made the sky, the mountains and the precipices of the soul
On the second he made the rivers, the seas and the oceans
And all the other feelings –
And gave them to Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Anthony, Cleopatra and Ophelia,
To Othello and many others,
To own them, they and their descendants
For ever.
On the third day he gathered all humans
And taught them the tastes:
The taste of happiness, of love, of disappointment,
The taste of jealousy, of glory and so on
Until all tastes finished.

Then some people who had been late came too
The creator caressed them sympathetically,
And told them they had nothing else to do but become
Literary critics
And contest his work.
The fourth and fifth days were devoted to laughter.

He released the clowns
To turn somersaults.
And he let kings and emperors
And other miserable people to amuse themselves.
On the sixth day he worked out some administrative issues:
He plotted a tempest,
And taught king Lear
To wear a straw crown.
Some waste remained after making the world
So he created Richard III.
On the seventh day he wondered whether he had to do something more.
The head managers had already scattered posters all over the earth
And Shakespeare thought that after so much work
He deserves to see a performance.
But before that, as he was unspeakably exhausted
He went to die a little.
 

A STRAW / Un pai

A straw spent all his youth
In a pallet
And he thought that world had only one dimension:
Weight.

It pressed him
With a force equal to desperation
But how can you know this
When you did not spend all your youth
In a pallet?!

Now he feels free
Nights are as light as days,
Not even the dust sits on him
To rest for two hours in the afternoon.

As if he were not a straw any more
But a fluff,
A fluff from am angel’s wing
With whom he shared the pallet –
That light he feels.

He sometimes imagines
That, eventually, the air is also a pallet
A blue one
On which the master is snorring.
 

FRESCO / Frescã

In hell, sinners
Are fully revaluated.

With a tweezers, they take out of women’s heads,
Fasteners, hair pins, rings, bracelets,
Linen and bedclothes.
Afterwards they are thrown
In some seething coppers
To watch the pitch
Not to boil over.

Then some of them
Are turned into dinner pans
With which they carry the hot sins
At the houses of the retired devils.

Men are also used
At some of the hardest labours,
Except for the very hairy ones,
That are spun again
And turned into doormats.
 

WHO / Cine

Let’s search well
Who is hiding under us,
Let’s be very cautious
Whorm we call
I.

For you cannot rely completely
On anybody,
Let’s be careful, especially,
Whom we call
I.

Packed under
So conventional masks,
Laughter, weeping, love
We are striving, clumsily,
To be familiar to us.

We might even manage
In some moments,
But we are terribly afraid
When we hear our own voice.

(Traduceri de Mihaela MITITELU)