Poems in Winter by Flavia Cosma (ereader ebook .TXT) 📕

Winter Again


My eyes are filled with snow;
The moon’s eyes are covered in mud;
Forgotten in the cupboard, a spoon of dross,
On the table’s corner, enticing,
A glass full of hate.
Big cubes of ice tumble down into the void,
Crippled branches keep watch over deserted streets,
The snow creaks under unseen steps,
A white blanket mysteriously wraps
Putrefied, crimson leaves.
The season springs up and then dies;
Curses still linger in the rooms;
Time doesn’t let itself be bought,
Either with silver coins, or with priceless treasures.
Oh, if only they would release us from our dream too,
Before spring arrived,
So that the ancient, celestial longings,
The rains’ manes grown wild,
Streaming, wouldn’t overcome us.

Milky Sky

The milky sky sighs at the windows,
Confused, the sun hides;
Storms raking up far off oceans
Gambol through branches
With their fleshless arms.
In the quiet of the room we watch
The whirling of waters and foaming smoke;
It’s late autumn and the horizon
Grows misty under the mantles of clouds.

How will we nest from now on with no regrets,
Into the upcoming days without grace?
How will we knit socks full of dreams
For delicate, lightly treading soles?

Yellow cat-eyes follow us through our sleep;
Life takes shape; fogs rise.
Don’t cry, don’t cry!
Omens with sharp teeth lie in wait for us;
Unborn shadows impatiently demand
Their places, pre ordained.

I Am Wondering…
I am always wondering what our place on earth is?
Occupying among others a space
That was, or will be, theirs too,
Obstructing with our being a window,
That belongs perhaps to somebody else,
Drinking from wells founded by others,
Wandering the world with no clear aim.
Storms brew in our bosoms and anger grows,
We fight each other
For a dirty patch of snow,
Some mouthfuls of polluted air,
A crumb of the moon,
About two or three stars,
A loaf of bread.
Our children grow up ailing and bored,
They have no desire to see light,
Our struggles don’t mean a thing to them.
We toil, and we die, and all is in vain,
Nothing remains behind us when we go,
Neither country, nor dwelling, nor fame.

The Sighing

O, bird as red
As the sun at twilight;
An orange lingering
On the leafless branch.
Through the windows you peer,
A shy messenger;
But who sent you here?
What blizzards?
What turmoil?

Or maybe it was a sigh
That summoned you home,
A frenzied grief
making its way through walls,
Maybe it was the flesh,
a stretched linen,
A footpath for the pain,
Or the music, the smooth breeze,
Monotonously babbling
Through the veils of the soul.

The bodiless hand strikes at the gate;
Dreamingly, the snarl hovers over us;
Emptied of life,
-At random-
The mantle is drifting.


When I Left


When I left,
The sun,
An opaque rupture on the ragged sky,
Was slipping toward West.

When I came back,
The moon,
A round coin on the ashen linen,
Was rising among clouds.

Wrapped in a profound sleep,
Heaps of leaves
Scatter on the streets.
Rustling, colored tombs,
Embrace the city with their smoky arms.

My eyelids become heavy with coppered leaves;
In the throat of the day a foggy lump is growing.

And above all, and triumphantly,
The frost of the upcoming night.


Extinction


I am dissolving in my own helplessness,
Afire, I melt into a great fatigue.
Like a candle, I spend myself in fear,
The cat-fear,
The grandma-fear,
Mangling with a wild claw, tearing
All hopes into pieces, one by one.

Frightened, we glimpse into the mirror’s crystal,
The long corteges of phantoms, waylaying our flight,
They follow us in hungry beastly packs,
Or humble dogs, begging for a caress;
And we don’t know which sin, what wickedness,
We atone to this day, with our tears and longing.


Birds of Snow


Birds of snow
Sit on eggs of ice;
The sun coils itself among the clouds;
Heavy tassels sway on dark branches,
Unwarranted, everything gets older,
By one more life.

On lily-white table linen
Pomegranates bleed onto plates.
Outside, dark little shadows
Giggling, sweep the snow’s blanket,
Cheerfully leaving their fragile traces
Throughout the empty garden.

We welcome Christmas with fewer arms,
Our spines ache, stooping.
The wrinkle on our forehead bears witness
To the cold hearts,
To the guilty eyelids.

Under the moon’s watch
Tired little shadows fall asleep,
Lying on their sides in the snow banks,
Roaming in deep sleep the magic tales
Full of enchanted fairies,
And countless orchards with their trees heavy
From sun’s overripe nests.


Waiting For the Snow


Waiting for the snow
The sun dries up too;
Withered leaves
Curl up again,
Cellophane flowers
Stand still on branches;
All things unravel one after the other,
The rock melts,
The day shudders,
The world becomes a notion,
A word.

Only it,
The great worry,
An old mouse lurching at the foundation –
Scrapes with no let up, -
Wisely it makes its bed
Between two whispered words,
Between two heart’s throbs,
Between two moon rays.


Nausea


The phone ringing makes me feel sick,
The mailman with his letters thrown into the mailbox
Terrifies me.
The bustle of the street, the eyes watching,
The distance,
Weigh heavily,
Overwhelming me.

How many fresh wounds
On this weakened body,
Hurled from a chaste Eden to the earth,
Banished, humiliated,
Robbed and lied to,
Over and over again.


The Last of Leaves

The last leaves from the grape vine,
Fell noiselessly early this morning.
On the universal scale nothing has changed,
Just one question or two was added
To autumn’s turmoil.
We walk amid piles of rusty leaves,
Stenciled in black, as if being counted;
The golden hair of the old poplar,
Its mane, which the wind once jokingly mussed,
Now lies cut down to the ground.
Stately maple trees, sob yellowed,
Ill with consumption,
And it rains.

We lie in wait anxiously for winter,
And winter spies on us at every corner, too,
Its purse full of diseases and sins,
Like a wicked Santa Claus
Coming down earlier
From his book.


There Are Certain Ghosts…


There are certain ghosts
Who trail us
Everywhere;
Furtively sneaking into our rooms,
Into our icy and unfriendly beds,
Into weary work clothes,
Or into handsome finery
Used for celebrations.

They follow us humbly wherever we go,
Along pallid mountain ridges,
Into the blue depths of oceans,
Through rainy days,
Through sunny days.

It is our own fault, for in our carelessness,
We didn’t permit them a natural death;
We didn’t allow them the time, the instants needed
To spool their threads,
And wither;
To dance their ardent reels,
To bake round breads in outdoors kilns,
And spread washed laundry out
On white rocks, in sunshine.

With steely will, we have pushed them back,
Into a silent state of non existence;
And now they lie in wait for us obstinately
Behind tall gates,
In worm eaten floors,
That squeak and weep ceaselessly
Through insomniac midnights
Beneath our feet.


Tamed Fire


Today the fire burns gently, tamed;
The fir branch whispers,
Cut off.
Death wraps this Christmas tree
In its quiet, scented mantle.

Falling asleep, saps flow into fairy tales.
The candle’s flesh
Descends onto the plate;
The tears are forgotten.

On the window ledge
A bird sings its melancholy song
A spotted cat lurks
Beneath high vaults.

In the chaste stillness of the room,
The Infant, The King of Light,
Is being born
Once more.


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The storm is nearing
In white beginnings.
The wind twirls
Hungry under windows,
As the poplar struggles,
Risen by its armpits,
Gnashing with frozen branches
To undo its own dream
And smash its nests.

And the bird gets drunk
In the building whirlwind,
Lets its small body carry
Into the hurricane,
Swallowing with relish
At the boundless strength.
In the endless second,
It passes, lightly,
From the great crush
To hoarfrost eternity.


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In the dark
all things seem newer,
more beautiful.
Bodies loosen—lankier, lightened,
Smiles gather heat and mirth,
Hands again find the shadowed edge of dreams.

In the dark the grass is sprouting
From withered, ashen seeds.
Transparent blankets drape the horizon
With mysterious, blue snow.


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Like a burst of pitch
Spouting into clouds,
Black birds tear away from branches;
Pouncing, tumbling over us,
Petals in mourning, ill omens.

Frozen, late grass
Is ground by hungry beaks,
Clowns beckon to us,
obscenely,
Enticing us
With gloved hands.

Sister Death, at the window, predicts evil;
In the vast ether
Your voice lingers


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The snow-less winter
Breathes, long-winded,
Like an endless autumn
With no sun.
On the gray sky,
An eye of rainbow
--Round coin—
Intermittently appears.

During the nameless winter,
We dream of immense snow banks,
Of tender hands on the head’s crown,
Of warm lights, flickering.
We dream that together, we fall asleep
Sheltered, far away.


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I hear footsteps yet again,
Heavy footsteps, pressed to the ground.

Somebody is walking through the house.

I hear artful steps,
The whispering steps of a cat.

Somebody is coming up the stairs.

I hear the shuffling steps
Of a monk at Lent.
I get very frightened
By shining, black-shoed steps,
By funereal steps.

Toward the morning
Time straightens its back.
Its steps are trampling us
All-embracing.

We’re setting the table
With bread made of stone.
Heavy weeping descends
From the clouds filled sky.

The steps keep time
In the chilly room.
Stale, food thickens on the plate.
Day, shuttered in,
Slowly spends itself.
Why?
What I am waiting for?
And who
Is there still to come?


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The road stays, sated, white,
Stretched out, facing the sky.
Rare snowflakes slowly descend,
The branch keeps mum,
A nest laid bare.

The river lifts its shirt at the shores,
Runs higher and higher on its fleet feet,
Runs hurriedly with the fish and the shadows.

Trice slips the footstep
On snow-hidden ice;
Mirrors slyly gleam beneath the flimsy cover;
The horizon teems with eyes and snares;
We christen each other with high reverence,
We want the recollection of who it is we are
To carry us forward.


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Snowflakes pounced at the car windows,
Smashed against frozen pane
To crumble on the road and then to stand again.
Gathering their cursing in hurried counsel,
With its breast white and withered by high winds
The highway, unleashed, raced
Towards a certain place unseen in the distance,
Like the frog who preordained dashes
Toward the open mouth of a snake, and jumps.


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The wind races madly over the hills
Like time that grouts scraggy brows,
The snowflakes circle in tender dance,
The frost descends at midnight;
Winter’s blanket spreads over the houses
Wistfully.

Unknown pains pierce the monotony
With severe, invisible daggers:
Is this, perhaps, the hour?
Is this, perhaps, the moment?
Fright bites us hard;
The wings, heavy with question, stop flight.


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