Ten Thousand Gallows (Mariana Marin) - In Memoriam Poem by Lucia Stefanovici

Dumb founded you finally stare one day
to your own life.
You still retouch it a hand,
you still put it a grimace
under covers of which no one knows.
you still pour a piece of bad luck in its glass
Lucidity would not find us out like that
in the one eyed look of people.
We should be more careful
with our secret skeleton,
to cheat the reality with muscles of doped athlete
who sings us daily the burial.
But who knows what it's better to us?
So I stay also
and stare to my own life.
It is also a kind of anesthesia, too
but different than others.
You humiliate yourself with love,
it murmurs you milk and honey
from a country which it was not to be yours, too.
It dresses you in the purple of pomegranate
and after that it sucks you a little more blood,
it slaps you in the face.
During my childhood I used to eavesdrop
to anything it was forbidden
- a prophylactic method for a light maturity.
Today I collect information about a summary oldness
which has started to grow on my palm.
Even ten thousand gallows
risen up along the great literature
would be less frightening
than what it was given me to hear.
Dumb founded you finally stare one day.

Poem by Mariana Marin, from The Mutilation of An Artist as a Young Man
(translated by Lucia Stefanovici)