On the Fifth Floor
Poetry,
when the putrefied loneliness of each morning
thunders inside your skull.
On the fifth floor of a drab apartment building
in a notorious proletarian district,
poetry restores to you the migratory instinct
of small gray birds.
How much love
"When must everything depart from us?
Does everything abandon us?"
(yes, time once held cherry trees and ivy).
In your rabbit-like shamelessness
what kind of death
did you make your bedfellow in these recent years?
Oh, poor earthbound terror!
Poetry,
when inside your skull, like a miracle,
you feast on yourself.
There will come a time for frost and for the snout,
a time for the whip that lashes your cheek
and for small gray pigs.
————————————
Mariana Marin
Paper Children
translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006
