Poetry

By

Dragos Niculescu

The lonely people of the world

Take care of the lonely people of the world,

because they, indeed, know the secret of loneliness,

there are forgiven many on earth and in heaven,

their tears smell of holiness

and their icon, which is still being fulfilled,

will be a seed of light that will work also for others.

Take care of the lonely people of the world,

because the lonely people are the most lonely of those who

live, they, when moving a stone with the mind and the soul,

don’t ask anyone for help, they, when forgetting the close smell

of the flower, forget it carelessly memory, forget it like a kind of

thorough forgetting, like a due that bleeds from the deep.

Take care of the lonely people of the world.

The leaves you see falling from the trees

are nothing but the warm coating of their soul,

the white flakes of the winter are nothing but the warm coating

of their soul, the heavy and blessed drops of rain

are nothing but the water with which their soul will give

testimony about the weight itself of the great truth.

Take care of the lonely people of the world,

for the time will come when they will no longer be,

and with them will die the painful beauty of loneliness,

and on earth will not remain than unlonely people,

those who will seek relief in the solitude of some

incomprehensible deserts, untouchable, and will cry to return

among them those who, dying with spore every day,

understood that this means a reward,

a great and peerless reward.

When the birds fly low

It was a time when the birds flew very low,

close to the trees, and even the disappearance of a

coin from the bottom of the public fountain was putting me

in a condition of vomiting and disorientation.

I was sitting at some quarter century smoked table

and I started drinking to gasp for breath.

I wasn’t drinking alcohol, or, better said, alcoholic drinks,

because these, drank on various occasions, were fatiguing

my sensitive body.

In front of me was parading the same desizing,

insignificant world, with successive communications,

with the same almost automatically, regularly human walking,

without which those dolls couldn’t have been moving forward

from point A to point B.

It happened to fall some old men in front of me,

at some distance, and, until I got up, could see

how an electric light was fading in the grocery, though it was

in broad daylight and there was no light lit.

And then, engrossed in my thoughts, I was wondering what the hell

am I doing in this gelatinous, usurper of vital energies city,

lacking any perspective, in which the existences are only some

poor ghosts in an extremely serious, tragic, delusory scenography.

I couldn’t find any answers, and then I was buying a bunch of flowers,

getting up from the table and, stopping a carriage, I was ordering:

“To the train station!”, although there, in a kind of periphery of the city,

I was never expecting anyone to come, nor to leave.

Dragos Niculescu

Awarded in national and international literary contests, Dragos Niculescu’s poems were published by many important publishers and cultural magazines, Dragos figuring among the fifty most important contemporary Romanian poets (Noesis Cultural Society’s Anthology, 2001). He has published upto now three poetry volumes and has in print two poetry volumes and one drama volume. He is also a literary critic and cultural redactor. In addition, Dragos is an active presence at the book fairs and literary circles of the Writers Union of Romania.