catacombs (poems by Florin Caragiu, English translation: Simona Sumanaru)

Roma, Catacombe dei Ss. Marcellino e Pietro - Giona rigettato









1. the cloak

Motto:
We have played the flute for you and you would not dance;
we have sung you dirges and you would not weep.
Luke 7:32, Matthew 11:17)

you have played the flute for me and I would not dance
I have plundered territories with my teeth clenched without sensing
the departure signal:
a fear of light throbbing inside my stiff body
the voice of things that don’t belong to me
and the circle in which a gold chain
tightens around my restlessness

you have sung me dirges and I would not weep
soaked in the crazily bent pleasure
down to the blind bone in the ruins:

an army pierced in its left flank
under the suddenly interrupted spin
of faces around the white bed

the cloak under which a flame cleans up my name
remains the desert in which the only possible way
is the feeling of being held by the hand

and so my breath will last for as long as I pay forward


2. confession

motto:
"here lies a man who could not become god"
G. Papini, "A Finished Man")

from dawn till dusk
one can reach holiness

yet most often I get to do
what seems strangely easy -
I regard God as superfluous
and look for Him only when I need to
knowing He will always take me back

and so the days go by
like the sea embracing a drowned man

the gaze produces the illusion
that entraps the years with no escape

blood no longer transfers into words

the experience of what is impossible to reach
without changing
is the only one I go without
although without it all the rest fade

and the game’s growing insecurity
starts to resemble
the fear of love


3. catacombs

everything is alive here

upon your chest I laid the sun
we’ll share tonight
outside the uniforms move on their own
vacant stones
dig wells into bodies
our song will encircle time
split up into breaths

at dawn all walls
will crack in wonder

Jesus’ name is the artery through which
light returns to this tired heart
called earth

(poems published in the volume "catacombe. aici totul e viu" ("catacombs. everything is alive here"), Vinea Publishing House, Bucharest, 2008, pp. 32-34. English translation: Simona Sumanaru.)