Poems
Twilight
Gets the clouds hemmed with purple, once, and once again
It's a daily performance, free, and complete.
The actor sun never gets tired,
But us, we act the last scene, unfair, and out of use,
Then retire toward a foggy horizon...
Feeling rather alone, and forever, and maybe too slow.
poem by Adriana Maria Niţă from Algoritm literar (2013), translated by Dan Costinaş

Added by Dan Costinaş
Comment! | Vote! | Copy! | In Spanish | In Romanian
The Listeners
'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
[...] Read more
poem by Walter de la Mare

Added by Dan Costinaş
Comment! | Vote! | Copy! | In Romanian

Killed at the Ford
He is dead, the beautiful youth,
The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,
He, the life and light of us all,
Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,
Whom all eyes followed with one consent,
The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,
Hushed all murmurs of discontent.
Only last night, as we rode along,
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,
He was humming the words of some old song:
'Two red roses he had on his cap
And another he bore at the point of his sword.'
Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill;
[...] Read more
poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from Flower-de-Luce (1867)

Added by Dan Costinaş
Comment! | Vote! | Copy! | In Romanian
Latest poems...