The virtual goat
Old woman Floarea’s goat
and Saba’s Semite goat
even now graze the same
grass in the flat piece of ground
where I used to bring my
goats too in my childhood.
And in Paris the virtual
goat lives
in my son’s computer and
tries to bleat.
It is a problem of
adjustment and generations
of life and its
shadow –
aporia
that gives reality headaches
and far-off
Parmenides
And my dilemmas have the
typical impatience of
the old ones-sieve time starts flying from
when I feel the electronic sting of ants on my skin.
Death goes on being
improbable
changing colour with life
on Rubik’s cube
under my clumsy fingers'
turning.
It is said that "to
be" is its own reason
but where does it start
from
and who I
which life?
The night pokes its
virtual horns through the window.
The elder Pliny
At the going out of sleep
the surprised daylight
is a cat lapping milk of
Latin from the page
of the textbook open
forgotten on the table by your son
at the text on old
Pliny's death.
The nephew
relates with stern
sadness Vesuvius's rage
and the tribune’s end
drowned by lava:
"habitus corporis
quiescenti quam defuncto similior"
and over
"defuncto" the hand of your son (who watched you
while you were sleeping)
farsightedly marked
with an almost invisible
pencil the word "dead"
fixing the centre of the
translation – mark not cruelty –
for exam day when
improvisation
could play nasty tricks
on him-for instance
a remaining for the
second year in the same class and
malignant demoted
daemon to urge him
to translate not the fact
that the old man died
looking as though he were
sleeping
but rather he was
sleeping looking like the dead
Days of confused
translations when
not even the pupil who
has been awarded a prize knows well
if you come out of sleep
if you go in …
Tags
Trains come out of the
suburban dark
with raging inscriptions
painted at night
when the blighted ones
from the ghettos creep into the triage station
to tattoo on the doors
their name and their surprise
to see themselves right
in the cyclone of forgetting - there where
"to be" is
aired very fast and becomes "to have been"
fading on the dirty
shop-window
"grafity"
travelling on the metro's
carcass to the city centre
on the circular lines of
indifference
anonymous yells
in the cold draught of
time through the galleries
where absence is
pollinated by the bustle of rats
at the words passing by
"tags"
on the walls' crust read
only by the blind’s eyes
and a rolled way to
embitter the
uselessness
when peerlessness comes
up against its own
shoulder
in the world
Dasein solitude
of the outskirts and the
rancor of sending
off
nothingness leapfrogs the
goat over logic's back
and non-being naughts
rushing to find out
why something exists
rather than nothing
some nothing coming by
metro rather than something something
and something rather
existing as inexisting
only in his rage breaking
out towards the
world-defiling
of railway sentences
through the whites of the eyes
poetry-incision-public
transport parasite
life on the smashed-up
bus-metaphors
come to the end of the
line and quickly swept out
in the bus-sheds under
the chemical jets
dissolving the letters…
Author’s Bionote :
*Dinu Flamand was born on June 24, 1947, in the Bistrița-Năsăud area of northern
Transylvania, Romania. He is a poet, essayist, journalist, translator and
commentator on current political issues in the Romanian and international
press. She obtained a degree in Philology at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj,
in 1970. During her studies, she became a founding member of “Echinox”
magazine, which marked many literary generations through her anti-dogmatic
spirit. After graduating, he worked in newsrooms, magazines and publishing
houses in Bucharest. At the end of the 80's he obtained political asylum in
Paris, where he denounced the oppressive regime in Romania, in the written
press (Libération, Le Monde) and on the radio (RFI, BBC, Free Europe). He was a
bilingual journalist at Radio France Internationale from 1989 to 2009. After
the fall of the communist regime, he reintegrated into Romanian literature. In
2011 he was awarded the Mihai Eminescu National Prize. In the same year he
became an adviser to the Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later
represented Romania at the International Organization of La Francophonie. Dinu
Flamand has a vast work published in Romania, especially poetry but also
literary criticism or translations. His poems have been translated and
published in various countries such as Spain, France, Italy, Mexico, Brazil,
Portugal, Germany, Chile, Honduras, Colombia, North Macedonia, Greece, Israel,
Czech Republic and more. Among the titles are: “Apeiron”, 1971, “Graftings”,
1976, “State of Siege”, 1983, “Probationary Life”, 1998, “Intermediate Cold”,
2006, “Shadows and Cliffs”, 2010. Recent publications: “Vigil and Sleep”, 2016,
“Spring in Prague” 2017, “A man with a paddle on his shoulder”, 2020
(Lucian Blaga Prize & Romanian Academia Prize). An anthology of his
poetry has been published in Greek (“Κατάσταση πολιορκίας και άλλα
ποιήματα”) translated by Victor Ivanovici, (editions Govosti, Athens, 2019).
The latest anthology in Greek (“Η βροχή στη μνήμη του σύννεφου”), translated by Dimitris
Kanellopoulos (editions Oropedio, Athens 2026).