World Poetry Tour - Anghel Dumbraveneau

With a few exceptions, I tend to favor poetry in translation: Japanese, Chinese, Estonian, Spanish, Turkish, Swedish and on and on. I thought this week I would post a poem a day from poets around the world, each day building on this post.

Here is the week's last poem.

Astonishment

A great many things are no longer clear to me:
The poplar has left its place by my gate,
My spring has silted up.
To tell you the truth, I can no longer respond
To a woman's smile.
I'm haunted by the vision of a forest path
Very long ago
And I can remember
Only the rooms of the wind
Where I loved without shyness,
My waking up alone.

Anghel Dumbraveneau, Romania

... Thursday, Jaan Kaplinkski.

The house silent
water drippings
from a rinsed diaper
into the empty basin
everybody asleep

I forgot
a short poem that
came into my mind
sitting in the rocking chair
with my little daughter
in my lap

I did not dare
to take a pencil
and write it down
feeling this silence
and the sleeping child
has a meaning
deeper than words

Jaan Kaplinski, Esontia

... from Wednesday

A Hyphen

When you look into a biographical dictionary
you see entries such as So-and-so (1903-1950),
meaning the person was born in 1903
and died in 1950.
The hyphen signifies the person's lifetime.
The entry So-and-so (1909 - ),
with nothing following the hyphen,
means the person is still alive.
Whether one is listed in biographical dictionaries or not,
everyone alive has a line dangling from behind his back.
Though it is invisible,
it somehow makes me curious -
the blank after the hyphen.
-Tadashi

... From Tuesday

From the Bodies

From the blue and black bodies
that walk at times through my soul
come voices and signs that someone intreprets.
It's dark as the sun
this desire. Mysterious and grave
as an ant dragging away the wing of a butterfly
or as the yes that we say when things ask us
--do you want to live?

Jaime Sabines, Spanish

... from Monday

Lifetime

A child sat
at the tide
at sundown

listening
to the sea
saying sea

and all those
years later
listening

understands
what saying
nothing means.

Cid Corman