"We are the Generation of Extinction"

by Ștefan Manasia

Translated from the Romanian by Clara Burghelea

We are the generation of extinction

1.

If Yemen has not offered Pasolini the setting
for Il fiore delle mille e una note,
it would have disappeared by now,
swallowed by sand. 

2.

The only beauty of Yemen
is its own richness, said Pier Paolo,
bewildered and prophetically.

And the camera’s lens worshiped
terraces and walls, Sana’a’s porticos
isolated in a middle age

pleasing UNESCO’S bureaucrats.
Statues and fortresses, clay churches,
Christian communities,

(no matter how plain it would sound)
the species, the poor species, Sonia Larian,
they all disappear these days in a gloomy vortex.

We are the generation of extinction.
The previous one enriched the uranium,
encapsulated napalm, the bacteria, the viruses.

The nice yester young people warmed up
the ovens. Sprayed their fine suits with Katin
and Kolîma perfume. And a monkey,

naughty nosed and wicked eyed, 
planted the tree, two leaves at first,
then bigger branches, rich foliage

and carnivorous flowers. I wish to have
breathed in petrol nights like the Arabian
stories. To lurk for hours, how the window
foretelling my death, opened.  

SO/NN/ET

The bed sea stowed in a book by Nino Stratan.
In the air, the rippling world of Ion Mureșan.
Inside, the winter light. The softly dusted dawn.
Below, the wasp of sadness dropping spawn

green eggs in our flesh arrayed in cellophane
in Muri’s world, a bomb of Mazilescu’s strain.
Indoors, all wobbly, Silurian poets congregate
it’s where the wasp of sadness will abate

and Heraclitic skies through winter light pervade.
This afternoon, peaked at through double-glazing pane
shines on the artificial hop, liquor profane.
The fighting little angel, like Pardaillan, 

will plan the bomb for commedia dell’arte, 
                              panopticon, cancan:
across its width, it’s clear and it’s plain,
  there reigns the world of Ion Mureșan.

Poltergeist in Făget Forest

I took lots of photos, according to personal logic,
but the ectoplasmic entities failed to appear
on the screen. I took pictures of white, red ribbons
hanging from trees but the sudden wind 

didn’t make them vibrate, in the Morse alphabet
or another code. It was sunny and cold.
We were wearing thick clothes. Aware we could
still not have made to Baciu or Hoia 

where paths turn into Gates. You were 
so disappointed and on the way back, you made 
no effort whatsoever to hide it. I felt like 
choking you every twenty steps, but the coiled

trail, the unveiled roots (beech trees or elm trees),
looked odd enough in the crisp, shining afternoon.
I took artistic photos. A month later you praised them
as if you had taken them yourself, while you were

walking, throbbing like a knot of snakes. Then we 
stopped. You couldn’t understand all the exotic names,
the numbers scribbled and spread on the tree trunks.
Your nerve cells were fast processing, here, in the deep

forest, unknown to the crowds of tourists. My throat was
dry when I finally understood, almost instantly, 
that the forest had slurped us into its strange necropolis,
where the silence of the guilty souls had heavily become,

as the poet would say, deafening. It pained you as well
as if a gun sent from the future would have held you
among the trunks encrusted with numbers, names, crosses,
amid the crowns easily rocked under which Bobby 

and Bonnie and Little Sock and Jack rest and where those 
guys that can hardly breathe in the city, daily shamed
and hysterical, are coming now to howl wordlessly, rave, 
cry for Bobbie and for Lassie for Bonnie Little Sock for Jack.

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Photo cover by Julia Dragan