Maybe it's time

Maybe it's time to wrap them up - he said -
these demons yelling in my head
these crazy bitches clasping my veins shut

And the heart pumps dry.

Three angels. Salt wings.
Many revolutions that went by
bad girl moods
hazel eyed peters.
Getting stuck . Falling in love.

Move slowly on - he said.
Another is waiting. In line.

Happines with you was a cry of despair

Panic within
your cubicled heart
just naked white
walls naked skin
I hurl curse scream 
obscured cubicle walls
pushed in

 Excerpt from the 3:15 Experiment  (August 21 )

The closed eye -Ana Blandiana

Today, I would like to present to you the poetry of Ana Blandiana.


Her poetry was censored and its publishing banished during the communist years due to political reasons. She continued to be an active presence in the political environment after the fall of the Eastern regimes in 1989, and she took over the presidency of P.E.N. Romania in 1990.

Yet what I like most of her poetry is the melancholic voice and feminine gracefulness of her language. Here is a poem I recently found online (in Romanian ) and translated for you.[1]

The Closed Eye

Not for a moment did I dream to close my eyes

for fear that

I will crush the world between my eyelids,

I will hear it crumble with a loud crunch

a peanut between my teeth.

How long can I steal my sleep?

How long could I

keep it alive?

I watch gaze with despair,

work up my pity for

this defenseless universe

that will perish in my closed eye.

1. The original "Ochiul inchis" can be found here.

Hope

I had faith that always.
hoped that always
beauty &love will flow free
never, but NEVER accept
to be encaged by paradigms,
stereotypes…patterns.


A happy new year from to you out there, you who are reading our stories, you who follow this blog

  from me (the author) and also from

Anaïs , Annamari, Nim , Yuri and Mona !

Wordless Wednesday

Sleeping Cat by Beatrice

Today the question is....

To act or not to act?

about renewal

The first dawn - year 5771

"En medio del camino de nuestra vida"

Dante Alighieri -La Divina Comedia

El Infierno: Canto I

So spoke the poet: I found myself lurching in darkness because the right path was forgotten.



They call it midlife crisis nowadays.
What's a midlife crisis? It's the stuff of jokes and stereotypes –
The time of life when you fall for a much younger woman
or man. He buys a red sports car or
walks out the door to buy cigarettes and to never return.
Or they just walk out of their lives .(Three years in the row.
It happened three years in the row, from what she knows)



What's a midlife crisis?

these days, the old midlife crisis

more likely to be called a midlife transition

--  it's not all bad.


So spoke the woman as
she unlocked herself from the earthliness
of her goals and asked  from him
no more, no less  but to create the world.



Also used text from :"Midlife Crisis: Transition or Depression?" by Kathleen Doheny , retreived from:http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/guide/midlife-crisis-opportunity

Artsy

a colorful paper molded hand modeling a bracelet made from band aid strips. the neat part - this is the work of a five year old.

Reading Travels: Anil's Ghost

South Asia: fifth month, fifth travel


I was talking with a friend about writing and writers the discussion carried us to Michael Ondaatje and his memory: "Running in the family". A book I had recalled with almost hedonistic pleasure as I had imagine how it felt to be a traveler in my way to Ceylon and be covered by the smell of cinnamon even before the ship had reached the sore. Or to soap myself under the monsoon, drunk with the deliciously heavy smells of the jungle and tea fields.





I was still under the impression of these imaginary memories when I started reading "Anil's Ghost".



Ondaatje 's stylistic approach to "Anil's Ghost" is no different than his approach to "Running in family" . An uniquely rich language. The cinematic quality of his storytelling. The human complexity of his characters which always end by surprising the reader - even the secondary, supporting ones. The way he captures the smell and feel of things and situations. He attempts and succeeds one more time to draw us in an almost mythical Sri-Lanka which is larger than life itself. But as we step in a decade later, in the middle of a civil war, smells and images are no longer festive. The Tamil wife reeks cinnamon no longer but iodine.





Former swimming champion Anil Tissera returns to native Sri Lanka after a fifteen years long  absence. Her story may seem quite trivial to this point, not that Anil is an ordinary woman but because she is yet another South Asian immigrant who came the US on a scholarship, built a professional reputation and is now returning to her homeland.
But she is not returning in order to visit family and friends, in fact she does not have any family in Sri Lanka, nor any close friends other than her elderly nanny. She is representing the UN in a feeble attempt of human rights activists to make light in the cases of thousands and thousands of missing civilians as result of the Sri Lankan civil conflict. And as soon as she arrives she will feel unwelcomed. Though, in the beginning, there is no aggressive gesture to make her feel undesired, there is a passive way of expressing it. The government  had to accept an UN investigation in order to prevent its already tarnished image from being permanently destroyed in the western world. Nobody with an official position wants her  there. Then, there is the coldness of her teammate Sarath. The suspicious silence surrounding her.



But, as said, Anil is no ordinary woman. Anil favors desert being born in on an island of luxurious greens and monsoon rains. And if there is one character trait that remained unchanged during her life transformations and transgressions that is determination. Determination when she bargained for her brother’s middle name (and her gender transgression). Determination when she won the swimming race. Determination when she moved to UK and to US afterwards without regrets, without looking back (cultural transgression). Determination to find the identity of a twentieth century skeleton buried among hundred years old ones on a restricted access archeological site. A skeleton she calls Sailor.



Pursuing the search Sailor’s identity, Anil is pursuing a ghost. The ghost of civilians went missing in the previous decade. Because his skeleton was found in a restricted access area, to discover Sailor’s identity was meant to prove the government involvement in the abduction and torture of civilians. And more, to name Sailor is to name of the faceless victims of the war. War ghosts.



In her pursue, Anil navigates an estranged yet familiar world. She became a foreigner –she forgot to speak the language, she does not understand the mentality, the customs any longer and she does not trust the people. She does not trust her teammate Sarath either, and for that she almost pays with her own life. But the reason why she cannot comprehend the people among which she grew up, the culture that shaped her childhood and teen years runs deeper. In war ridden Sri Lanka normality* had became a ghost of itself.



A blindfolded man forced to ride on his captor’s bicycle has to hold on the executioner’s neck in order to keep his balance. Sarath recalls: "It was this necessary intimacy that was disturbing"[p.154] Sarath’s dead wife, Ananda's missing wife and Gamini’s death marriage. A doctor sleeping in blood stained clothes in the ER waiting room. Crucified truck drivers, beheaded school children. The skeleton of a summer house. A young girl who is more afraid of her peers than she is afraid of the jungle. War ghosts…



On a personal note:

The book layered symbolism reaches beyond the local tragedy of civil war and the war effects on the local culture to issues such as the meaninglessness of wars, transnational identity and global citizenship, human weakness. And thus it is significant for any reader, even for the ones who do not care much for South Asian history or lifestyle.

The epilogue builds a parallel of the final scenes in Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”. And as Rublev it offers an alternative to what is reasonable-normality* and the irrational, ghastly war. Anil " used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic" [p. 55]. However, like Rublev, Ananda finds it in the artistic expression of religion.

Note:
*as in our trivial, common language understanding of life

Watching the Fourth of July fireworks

Trapped between

blooming fireworks on a distant summer sky

and your incidence beyond me , humid and tangy.

I'm under the influence

your touchless warmth wrapped against my senses

futile are all my sensible choices.


To turn around, to take a dive deep down'our

moonstruck flagrances.


To step forward, to blast myself into this July sky

so brilliantly.




join me on the train here.

...(back) to the land of green plums

Lola came from one of the poorest provinces of the country. Where the drought season is survived only by sheep, melons and mulberry trees. There are six children in her family. There are six roommates in her dorm room. Lola came to the city to escape poverty. She went to college for a major in Russian. The interest in Russian majors was low and so was the selectivity. "Wishes are difficult, writes Lola, goals are easier". She wants to marry a gentleman with carefully cut fingernails and a college degree. She wants to return to her village as a lady.

Lola joins the Party. God watches over us up-above, the Party watches over us down-below.

Lola is with baby but she didn't get married yet. Lola commits suicide.

One of her roommates finds her notebook and reads it. The notebook brings her closer to three other students. They are all members of the German-speaking minority. They bring in books banned by Party Censors, they send back letters into the West.

After graduation she gets a job as a translator in a factory. There she befriends Tereza. Tereza can allow herself to behave childish - her father is someone rather important in the party. Tereza is now hiding the forbidden books, pictures ...the notes. Tereza is Romanian.

By the end of the book all have left the land of green plums behind. Two of them are in Germany. The other carry their sack someplace else :"a belt, a window, a nut, a rope."

Herta Müller is the 2009 Nobel prize laureate for literature. Her work counts around fifty volumes of essays, poetry, short stories and novels. Unfortunately, most of them stall in the time of the communist regime . And whilst there is a need for well written accounts about that epoch, I tend to think that sometimes there are too many such accounts. Thus I will not recommend that you read all her writings, not unless you are obsessed with the period. But I say that one must tread at least a few of her works. And one novel I will recommend with no hesitation is the Herztier [1] translated as the Land of Green Plums.

Herztier is a collection of individual stories, one of the best to capture the mix of ideology and feelings that lead the four young friends to revolt. A revolt which seems, at times, as silly as the wooden toy with hens they enjoy playing under a mulberry tree. Because it is not an ideology that is leading them, but exactly the contrary - a rebellion against ideologies. Ideologies like the one of their fathers who fought in the SS troops as well as the ideology of their torturer, secret police officer Pjele.

Herta Müller masters, perhaps better than most contemporary writers, a language that is equally plainly narrative and poetic, laden with metaphors and rich with feelings. And thus she is not only to reconstruct a landscape that is historically authentic but also to reconstruct the way the same landscape reflects in the hearts of young people who experience love and friendship whilst they are pushed towards shameful betrayals and their particular ways to repent for these betrayals.

For me, Herztier touched some of the deepest chords within my heart's memories. Because I lived once in the land of green plums and alike the narrator it had become impossible for me to escape it no matter how far away a traveled.


[1] Herztier means literally The Herartsanimal . And for those who read in Romanian but not in German, I suggest the Romanian translation -it may come closer to home.

wordless

© Alex M.

Reading Travels: Precious Harlem

Each time I plan a trip to New York City I realize that Harlem never makes it to my list. There are many things to see –and my vacations are too short and Harlem seems like a part of the city that does not entice the visitor much…
But I had been to Harlem twice this month – as an imaginary traveler that is. First was the movie: Precious. Than it was the book: Push.

Push is poetry. True, Sapphire is more of a poet than a novelist, but it is in the way Precious carries you through the dark reality of her life that poetry is born. There is in each of us, no matter what, that grain of humanity, beauty, love which is our most precious gift. As in a poem.
Precious is what I call a beautiful person. So is Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe . When beauty is not measured in inches and pounds. Or kilograms and centimeters.
Her mother troubles more the movie viewer, in the book she lost any grain of humanity so it is the movie that makes her terrifying – there she only fell at the bottom of this continuum we may call human nature, but she did not step over the border. She could be one of us and that is hard to accept and internalize…
Ms. Rain –I imagine her more as the book depicts her on the rough, boyish side rather than the angelical, almost emaciated character played by Paula Patton. I imagine that it takes guts to work in the environment she did…

So…there is the story, as told by the book, poetic but not cosmetic (the movie had to bring in some serious makeup touches). The story of a world we do not see. The story of a city we never visit. Not because it is too far or because there is some wicked totalitarian force to build an wall and drop an iron curtain between us and them…But because we draw our own blinds to this world. We tend to notice what we would like to notice –and this is not something we wish to see. There is a curtain between us and Harlem, between us and a child called Precious. A child who becomes pregnant at twelve and nobody asks too many questions on how did it happen, and who is pregnant again at sixteen and the only consequence is that she gets kicked out of school. After all it is only another overweight girl on welfare. And what else can we expect form an overweight girl on welfare?

The assumption of a whole culture: the ones that are at the bottom of the pit are there because they deserved it. One does not need dignity for the mere fact that one is a human being. We are no longer preciously priceless but well priced. Or not...


Sadly but it is not just us, the ones living in the visible world, who are drawing the curtain.They are doing it too. The story of the people that assume the worst about themselves and then they become it. The story of children growing beyond this curtain and who never know that there is help. That there is a Ms.Rain. Or other children like them, the ones who live invisible lives in the visible world.


And the system, the sum of us and a little more, which is too concerned with self preservation. Systems do work the best when in a state of balance between us and them. And you, my reader, from the visible world are not really complaining about the system. Are you? After all, we are fortunate enough that even though we may have dark skin or we are overweight or we do have an invisible story beyond us -at least we were not born in Harlem and do not have to live on welfare. And we go on believing that no one, but no one, can have that much bad luck...

middle age

as she lets herself slide slowly into the middle aged bottomless pit, her body rounds, ripe for new emotions.

In Memoriam

And when I say "J.D, Salinger", you say what?


The Cather in the Rye, betcha'...



But when I noted this line on my Yahoo! email :

News Alert: J.D. Salinger, Author of 'The Catcher in the Rye' Is Dead at 91

I said "For Esmé - with Love and Squalor".

I was startled to read this news, once because J.D. Salinger died, and again that I only realized he had been still living all these years when I read the news of his death. Perhaps it was because  he never really existed for me. Did not knew a thing about Salinger as all I cared about was  this catcher in the rye.
Or I recalled Esmé's story because this was the first one of his stories I read? The one I recall each time when I receive a letter as friendly smile to pull me out of my own mess. The one I recalled when I was trying to yawn with my mouth closed as a proper girl will. The one I recall because:

" You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac-with all his f-a-c-u-1-t-i-e-s intact."

Three letters for Péter

this one poem is available now here:
Bolts of Silk :Three letters for Péter



(thank you, Juliet )

Nim's Christmas

In this sunless city in North America winter is one cloudy, smoggy season. Nim lies in bed covered only by his memories of childhood with all his strength drained by his effort to breathe in the wintry dampness. Memories of his mother and older sisters, plump healthy women, Rubens like beauties puttering in the kitchen. Memories of his father , the wine flows from barrels carelessly and the house opens for villagers and distant relations or old friends that came from afar to visit once a year in December. (His father was the village priest and wine was never in shortage for even more wine bottles would be received during all year longs’ services he’d have to celebrate; baptisms and funerals and memorial services). … He’d use to rush home from school so he can breathe deeply all the smells of December. He loved to hide in the damp basement among smoked meats and sauerkraut and the wine barrels and the jars full of pickled tomatoes and peppers. He’d hide in the basement and read books at the light of an old oil lamp, books about other boys that read books hidden in their attic.


* Nim can follow dear Anaïs from the comfort of pillows stacked on top of his bed. She busies herself with housework (since chemo is draining most of his strength, his friends are taking turns helping with housekeeping lately.) In his paroxysmic state he can hear the sound made by her plain, large clothing hitting the furniture; the sharp sibilant sound of her long skirt dragged on the floors, almost covering her silent footsteps. He raises his hands as to cover his ears with his arms. Nim is drowning within the muffled pillows and dozes off. But the thought, that she takes so much trouble to dress a lot plainer when she comes to visit alone, awakes him. As she is the woman who can stray me away from the righteous path, as there was a woman that could…He smiles.

“You are the apple of my eye, not the one of my sin”
“You were saying?”

She sits by him. Her hands hide in the large sleeves of her purple cloak, not precisely a chador for she never wore one, but equally shapeless and dull as it fades into its own shadow. Her hair is completely hidden under the scarf, her childish features cut abruptly, the round alizarin mouth looks almost severe. But today is a bad day. Smells make him sick – even her perfume. Not the light scent of rose and lilies, but the heaviness of sandalwood. The fragrant sandalwood reeks painfully his swollen airways as the sniffles start to bother him again. “Breathless again, I’m afraid. My skin is blue violets, my chest will crush under purple carnations, the crimson rain… “
She opens the window:
“It smells like winter”
“It smells like Christmas”


* Nim’s dream memories are usually blind. The Ignat is the smell of fresh blood and burning hairs. Saint Nicholas preserves the sweet smell of oranges and chocolate, fresh baked cookies. “And Christmas, how does it smell? “ she asks …Oh well, Christmas… Too many smells are melting into each other, he finds hard to peel their remembrances from his cortex.
Was it the sour smell of fresh dough?
Meat cabbage rolls?
The sour crude oil tang slinking into the homemade wine from the tar treated barrels ?
Freshly smoked pork?
Nim shuts his eyes. Christmas used to smell like his playmates. They came along each year, steadfastly, as he decided that the time was just good to go caroling. A handful of young boys cutting through the unsullied snow in the cold, damp smell of winter. They walked side by side laughing and singing, and when they opened their rounded, childish mouths, from the red delicious apple exhaled the smell of freshly baked sweets so to warm their frozen fingers.


* He drowns again in the fresh smell of whitewashed bed linen and drifts to a quiet sleep under her small damp hand as she touches his feverish forehead cooling it off.

And yet another translation...

Another attempt to translate one of my favorite poems by George Bacovia. According to his critics, Bacovia started as a symbolist poet who transcends the style in his later works. The poems I did translate by now: "Lead", Purple Twilight and Lacustrine are among his earlier writings and are part of the first volume he published, "Plumb"/ "Lead".
This is the poem used to title the collection, and probably the best from this volume...

Plumb

Dormeau adânc sicriele de plumb,
Şi flori de plumb şi funerar vestmânt -
Stam singur în cavou... şi era vânt...
Şi scârţâiau coroanele de plumb.

Dormea întors amorul meu de plumb
Pe flori de plumb, şi-am început să-l strig -
Stam singur lângă mort... şi era frig...
Şi-i atârnau aripele de plumb.

Lead

The lead coffins were lying deeply-asleep
Beside lead flowers and burial clothing –
I was alone in the crypt … the wind was blowing…
And the lead wreaths used to creak.

My lead amour was curling up asleep
On the lead flowers, so I began to shout at him-
I was alone with the dead… the air would chill…
And his lead wings would dangle.

Again, any suggestions and critiques are welcomed.

And the bonus is a French translation:

the listener...

She is in her early twenties, a dark-haired, slim, pretty girl. The passion with which she utters her words accompanying them with graceful ballet steps traced with her long arms and fingers makes her look beautiful. The fresh beauty of the young dreamer that hadn't been spoiled yet by the bitteres of the quotidian.

He is in his 40's , simply but well dressed, sustaining the discussion with a composed tone and the ease distinguishing the one rused with the matters of punctilio. A professor, no doubt...

So, as she takes on some very touchy subjects, he is thinking at her amber hips, and as she throws her hands up to stress the gravity contained by a word like "God" or perhaps " truth", he imagines her as the little, graceful skylark aiming for the sun. And with a grave tone he utters:

"I see"