Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: De-ale vieţii

Children saying scary things

My daughter (10), elated that she got into the class she wanted and avoided the all-girls class: ‘All-girls classes suck!’ Me, naively: ‘Why?’ My studious 10-year-old: ‘Because they’d be all prissy and there’d be no boys to fall in love with.’ Ladies and gentlemen, the main purpose of public schooling, right there… in case there…
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Podge and his book from the sky – A fable

Once upon a time there was a badger. We’ll call him Podge, because that’s what his friends called him. Podge was an intrepid and adamant little badger and he liked to roam the neighborhood at length, looking for fellow creatures to pester – or to snack on. On one of his nocturnal foraging trips, Podge…
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Things you can observe at 7 a.m.

I watched blackbirds today. I couldn’t sleep. Early at dawn I watched a parent feed her chick. The older one was dark – as burdens darken us; the younger pale, unknowing, made a fuss. Peck, peck, they went as their small beaks touched From where I sat, it looked as if they kissed. And it…
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Wind in the tall grasses

Today I will write about the wind in the tall grasses. Lost, immaterial, like our souls, Just a passage from one place to another. Just air. Just breath. Soft stalks undulating. It’s ballet. Beautiful submission. Soothing choreography under a ruthless sun. People pass by on their bicycles Barely noticing. Barely noticing the road leads nowhere.…
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Child’s play

A boy drags an empty bag through the sand. He’s tied it at the end of a rope.The wind blows into it, swelling it, ruffling it,making it float and thennearly ripping it out of his hand. The bag is as transparent and light as this boy’s soul.Boy, breath, wind blowing, soul… Later, when it’s full…
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Suspended

You and I on this small bridge where one can watch the passage of time in liquid form, the voices it drowns, the secrets it buries, the things that will never again be.
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Reawakening

Hear them shriek: virgin vitality, gratuitous vigor. Gull-ibility?…
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Inarticulate

So little left to express. Spleen? Acedia? The signifiers have lost their signifieds and are straying. Ideas, heavy as rock, sink to the bottom of rivers waiting to be swept away by a sudden flood of effervescence or settle, with the mud, along the banks of dam lakes and rot. Occasionally, some debris resurfaces –…
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Scrisoare către Biserica mea

Simt cum alunec. Simt cum mă pierd: tot mai adesea pe margini, tot mai adesea departe. Simt cum mă smintește fiecare creștet de femeie încovoiat și îmbrobodit, de parcă demnitatea luminoasă a făpturii umane, suficient de bună ca Dumnezeu să coboare în ea, e o vinovăție perpetuă ce trebuie mereu împilată și pironită cu ochii…
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New Year’s Eve 2020

You can tell by the fireworks. To this day, people’s hearts are set to the clocks in their homelands, far away. They go off at different times, then the smoke clears and the sky remains mysterious and quiet until the next full hour. You can tell by the fireworks. To this fateful day, the last…
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Falling in Love

In the dead of night – In that longest of nights he came to me, all aglow. An illumination of love. I was ready to let go, having run out of things to hold on to. “The world has done violence to your spirit”, he spoke through my sleeplessness, and his voice was husky. “But…
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The Pond

How the landscape changes With the moving seasons… No rebirth without dying Water and cut grass Shoulder-high saplings And all the encounters with pain. The piercing shrieks of white gulls Plunging, and us happy to disintegrate Why is it that in nature The lost are found, and dying Is grand and mollifying and fearless Like an embrace?…
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