Victor Pambuccian

Seeing in Hiding

View of the Dead sea from Temple Square in Jerusalem by Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka

when darkness unveils us
and we see again
the roads we’ve been on
we won’t be crying
nor singing
nor holding hands
for the wedding of trees
we won’t be dancing
in circles
of stone
for we’ll have only dreams
left
of each other
and that somber feeling
about the continued absence of
a coronet of
spring flowers from
a meadow we met
on our journeys
when we would carry
each other
on our shoulders

 

About the writer:
Victor Pambuccian is a professor of mathematics at Arizona State University. His poetry translations, from Romanian, French, and German, have appeared in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, International Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Black Sun Lit. A bilingual anthology of Romanian avant-garde poetry, with his translations, for which he received a 2017 NEA Translation grant, was published in 2018 as Something is still present and isn’t, of what’s gone. Aracne editrice. Rome. He was the guest editor of the Fall 2011 issue of International Poetry Review.

Image:View of the Dead sea from Temple Square in Jerusalem by Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853-1919). Oil on canvas. No size specified. 1905. Public domain.

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