Codru

Under the white sun,
Centuries-old villages lie in slumber
breeding multitudes, alien to my frets.
Their lively festivities have vanished into the void.

O savage kolkhoz, your shrieks of history
still soar over clusters of houses and barns,
over frozen wells.

I am in a land where no strangers wander,
where death’s causes are trivial,
where spring dreams lull the senses,
Blurring the line between the unknown and now.

Each fork in the road leads to a monastery or a winery.
A dog snarls by the corn store.
Christ’s tender gaze lights the path.
Yet I remain still —an icy pond.

Codru, they call it —
nest of squirrels and owls,
deer and foxes.

Scattering like the valley’s fading echo,
devoured by immensity.
Scattering like the sacred hush of woodland,
each dark trunk cradling lifelessness.
Scattering like the odorless twigs,
the bitter fog hugging earth.

Amid maples dressed in snow,
roots gripping frozen soil,
I stand in brown bleeding into white.

In this starkness,
I lock eyes with a deer family leaping in single file
through tangled branches.
They move like frost spirits marking their trail.

I let nature unfold its ephemera:
fox howls in the distance,
dark cracks in bark,
the rustle of leaf litter,
too-wit too-woo!
the true shape of bareness.

12.2023