Poems and Tales from Romania | Page 3

refuge Under
one eye. . .
The broken wings Have become tears As a home They have found
refuge Under both eyes. . . .
Flights, flights, Broken flights Now become refugees Under tear filled
eyes. . .

There is nothing Left of sight.
***

Story #1

BEDTIME WORRIES
*
The Story

I was born and raised in an orchard known by the name of Eden, 16th
orange tree on the left, and all my future hopes had been Left there with
the Ultimate Orange.
From what I can tell now, in this position of a painter detached from his
painting, there was nothing that you have not already seen or built
yourself about the way the orchard was structured, ruled or taken care
of. It was just a world, though I recollect within the Garden there was a
center of energetic emanation, in the shape of a circle of a small
diameter, having the made-up features of a human Fun Fair and which
they called, given its conceptual schema, the Wheel of Fortune. It had
been designed long before I was born, and before most of the people I
know of or inherited something from were born as well. Seen from the
outside, the whole gizmo was looking like the clearing of a forest or
like a woman's heart, at once shiny and shadowy, open and hidden
behind her instinctual veils. Surrounded by a range of tall grown
apple-trees, the Park was the Big Attraction for each of us, Eden
inhabitants.
By the time I learned how to walk, so you can guess my steps were
being haltingly taken my mind and my feet always tended to go
towards the apple trees, green and inviting as they were, projecting
their leafy silhouettes on the frowned face of the fall sky. I say
"frowned face" because the sky was crying a lot that specific fall, and I
could see its eyebrows of clouds turning purple or maybe violet, and
then dark blue. But who could tell exactly how an angry face changes
color, name the boundaries between serenity and gloom, since all you
distinctly perceive with your inner eye is the anger...?
The majestic apple-trees were unanimously loved, much more loved

than the nut-trees for instance, because people didn't have the required
patience to crack the nutshells open and taste the fruit. Only the crows
knew how to do that artistically with a dance of their beaks, but what a
pity, they were designed to be birds. Dark birds. Therefore, the people
of Eden always went for the apples with their mysterious perfume and
shiny skin, beautifully polished by the autumn rain. Usually at sunset,
while the sleepy birds were having their mystical ritual of initiation in
Phoenix's art of rebirth, the Garden's human inhabitants -less artistic
but more hungry than the dark crows themselves were silently heading
for the circle of apple-trees, perfectly rendered on the canvas of the
twilight, their leafy crowns in the shape of an arch. Any resemblance
with a circus bolt could be significant.
The inhabitants of Eden, as highly ambitious and responsible persons,
were constantly looking for shadows, willing to give it a shot in finding
their shattered dreams abandoned somehow in the games of the past
and now supposed to dwell in the merry-go- round, the Wheel of
Fortune, the Circus. They were doing it, to quote them: "Just for fun in
our world's Fun Fair, like a bedtime loisir."
Beneath the dark and orange shadows which can be somehow
reproduced by the color range of the fireworks you bathe in today the
earth was utterly alive and breathing. The numerous families of ants,
known as hardworking and also, in situations of necessity,
fellow-devouring creatures were putting their young to sleep with a
prayer for grains and shiny days. Some wonder nowadays who on earth
or in the skies could listen to the minuscule prayers of an ant. I let them
wonder.
The life of the Garden in its small size was not at all minimized for
people with binocular vision. These endowed people managed to
understand that the same earth who had once breathed us out through
its lungs had also breathed ants through its pores. Thus we got to count
small hearts and big hearts, small hopes and big hopes and people that
were in between, insectlike molded instinctual to paroxysm in
situations of necessity therefore half human. The scientists of Eden
called them the- half-blind-half-awake-half-hearted-half-humans, a
made-up qualificative and pretty hard to memorize since no name has
been invented yet for things that were struggling in the middle of what
we held as the Being Humane Scale. Statisticians, in their turn, noted

down in their papers the unprecedented discovery of an astonishingly
complete population of the above-mentioned category.
Life went