Translated from the French by Luke Hankins.
adagio
a sound rises a whiteness
from the region of the heart
autumn of slow breath stiff
bones of light
the fires in the garden have died down
: cities of the past
sleeping cities
I was afraid of vowels their paleness
beneath the moon
the nighthorses moving away
at a trot
no
it’s not a word not yet this vapour
escaping the mouth
ghost of a day
come forward, then black night’s feet
silver mouth
a statue also dies
ghost of a day
work of a sleeping god
your furtive lover’s gesture
caught in the web of the gaze the spider
and its cross
celestial linens on the unmade bed
: light
that appears rumpled
children of the fog
children of the fog
dense fog of those eyes gazes
intersecting
the paths of meteors
sons and daughters of the forbidden blue
years stained
black with forgetfulness
the dearest of my sisters life
at the entrance to the garden
where grow blooming bodies and beatific moons
rose rosemary
the earth begins
the earth begins one distant afternoon
with the breast’s
ochre colour
the transparent milk that flows and the mouth
that takes pleasure in it
with the memory of another land
which has just left us
the fear of losing it the breast withdrawn
the milk dried up
look—the earth is beginning
today
and ends with me as I wait you’d call it
a withered place
pinched between two fingers of silence
the earth begins (2)
the earth begins on the smooth page taut belly
exposed to the knife
an incision makes the red flow I touch the words
roll them hide them in my pockets
I erase their borders
I invent sleepful mornings
towards which dreams set out with slow steps like camels
and disappear
far away in the desert of the hours
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu was born in Romania and left the country permanently in 1983, at the height of the communist regime. She holds a Ph.D. in French Language & Literature and has taught French at Loyola University and Northwestern University. Writing poetry in three languages, she has published numerous books in the United States, France, Belgium, and Romania. Radulescu’s French books have received several awards, including the Grand Prix de Poésie Henri-Noël Villard, the Prix Amélie Murat, and the Grand Prix de la Francophonie.
Luke Hankins (b. 1984) attended the Indiana University M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, where he held the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Weak Devotions, was published by Wipf & Stock Publishers in 2011. He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose (Wipf & Stock, 2016) and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock, 2012). His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Collagist, Image, Linebreak, New England Review, Pleiades, Poetry International, World Literature Today, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media radio program “On Being.”
These poems are published by permission of Seagull Books. Un cri dans la neige by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu © Éditions du Cygne (Paris), 2009. Journal aux yeux fermés by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. © Éditions du Gril (Belgium), 2010. English translation © Luke Hankins, 2018.
Published on March 4, 2019.
