poems by Adina Dabija [translated]

by Adina Dabija
translated by Dorina Burcea
click aici pentru versiunea română

 

ahah-sahah-ala
 
ah hafiz

I would love to say to you: ahah-sahah-ala!

Nothing else that I could say would be enough

Ahah-sahah-ala – I yelled

one August evening on my porch

the day I first opened that green book of yours

from the Penguin Books collection

and I heard the wind rustling through the words

coming out of the page like leaves

on a much bigger tree

than I could ever imagine.

 

ah hafiz

how you flow through days and events

filling everything that has no name, just essence

– ahah-sahah-ala! –

how can a meaningless word

mean so much?

How you love to slip through your words

which is a well-known fact that are not yours

because it is your very nature

for you not to be you

but me

 

and other one thousand crevices

and the whistle blown by a breath

much bigger

than we could ever imagine.

 

I recognized you from the very beginning

even before I held you on my knees on the porch

people say you are just a Persian poet

from the 14th century

your books are on the shelves of the greatest libraries of the world

but what you really are is sparkling dust

dancing in the twilight.

 

 

 

Your right eye and my left eye

 

Your right eye in my left eye

(the other eyes hidden in pillows, sleepy)

Your right eye is a wave

That breaks against the beach of my left eye

My left eye is the seashell

In which you can hear your right eye

Your my right left eye measure the infinity between us

and become the eyes of the infinity.

 

 

 

Beyond the roundness

 

Everything is round in my house

Like blind eyes thrown on a stone table

Rolled by hazard with their white side facing up towards infinity.

In the middle of the house there is the oven.

A cold fire of light burns inside it

in you go bird – out you come flutter of wings.

That’s where life is – where the flight is.

Everything is round in my house

ground by the iron circle of the days

which roll the nights with their white side facing up towards infinity.

But roundness can only understand the logic of the round

because the shape is nothing more than its passing – time.

In my house,

the only thing beyond roundness

is this white fire burning my days and nights

burning everything in the indestructible longing for flight

–      it is You.

 

 

 

Summer Story

 

Let summer come

and I will bloom differently

because of a man with a chainsaw in his hands.

Let summer come

and I will bloom on the inside

in the heart of a little girl

who runs to pick up my fallen branches

because such beautiful stories used to rustle at her window in the night.

Let summer come

so that my flowers can

bloom white in the darkness of a little heart

like the stars blooming in the night sky

in the heart of infiniteness

Don’t cry, they’ve only cut my branches

so that you can direct your gaze up more often

towards those bigger and more distant flowers –

That’s how important gazing at the infinitness is!

Let summer come so that a little girl can put her ear to a crippled trunk

and hear the sap of life

against which no chainsaw has any power

and sing to me slowly

in the language of flowers.

poems by Adina Dabija [translated]

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