Night Dream Poem by Maria Mitea

- it was as if we were dressed in shmattes,
hungry and broken,
sometimes from pain, other times from joy,
so hungry
that we began to must each other's blood
scratching our tongues with tufts of straw,
as if we cleaned our impenetrable
like you would clean the blackburn from the bottom of a shepherd's cauldron,

- we were also surrounded by fire pits,
the tongues of the flames touched you as if they tasted pink salt,
as sheep do it in the winter,
I could see haystacks burning in your eyes,
people lined up with buckets of water
they handed the buckets from hand to hand to extinguish the fire,
some white birds were drinking the blood from your lips,

- then the tongues of fire fled from the waters and harnessed my eyes
they whipped at them,
shouts, screams, cries, children's laughter,
whinny horses, spreading sounds
until we woke up built-in two shores that were sinking at the bottom of the water.