Ruxandra Cesereanu: The Young Erinys

My long hair hangs in the air like winding twigs,
my viscera are fiery,
my face alive with wrath and glory,
the supplicants, terrified, lock themselves in cells,
but I am tired and I’d like to sleep
a whole spring on a deserted island.
My tongue glistens,
I’d speak scorpion stinging words,
I’d listen to the counsel of clawing birds,
night watches speak of my limestone temples
where fragrant rush holders are lit.
My body, a Corinth puma, feels trapped in trawl,
I shake tempestuously, I turn, I vibrate,
I am the young Erinys who steps on soles of mist.
Stone daggers slit my senses,
amongst the blind blood goddesses I was the shark of clay.
I can bet on the shadows of the dead,
my innate enchantress dreams
now blow like the zephyr, unlike the leaden storms.
The roar within is a hollow mountain,
at the daybreak I’d like to learn the language of light.
On a black widow’s boat I leave myself
for a white widow which could still be me.
Diffidently, I am listening to my rain filled heart,
a moving fruit, wandering the trees of desires.
I no longer want to cut with the witching sticks in the flesh of trouble,
if I lost my venomous traces,
I could create hyacinth from sea foam.
I was a wretched Erinys, a laudanum drinker across mad realms.
But from now on to hell with all the witching sticks,
with all the plagues and my unkind mouth,
and my bloodthirsty slobber,
let all the altars crumble under the shadows of blazing dead,
under the gorgons,
I don’t want to stay under the sign of the crescent moon,
burning within me there’s a priestess of the yellow sun
I am proclaiming for the first time.
I’ve broken in a swirl of feet
the dam of grass like thousands of buck horns.
Ahoy!

KORE PERSEPHONE (2004)