The Romanian poet, Radu Vancu, published several poems in the American magazine Plume, Issue #127, March 2022. Plume is a highly selective magazine, dedicated to publishing the very best of contemporary poetry.
Radu Vancu’s poems are extracted from his poetry book 4 A.M. Domestic Cantos, initially published in 2015, by the Romanian publishing house Casa de editură Max Blecher.
Radu Vancu is a Romanian poet, novelist and translator. He is the president of PEN Romania and he teaches literature at the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu. He is the editor-in-chief of the Revista Transilvania and the director of the Poets in Transylvania festival.
Canto I is one of the poems featured in the magazine.
Canto I
There will be people and they will push the world further.
Today it is evening, we are building a Lego police station
and we are watching Cars.
Today the world does not deserve to be pushed further than that.
Today we have not seen the sun struggling tetanized
in the sky. It seemed it never existed.
Today God was not the concept with which
we measure our pain, as John sings.
Maybe it measured the convulsions and torture of the sun,
what do I know. For us there existed
only the slow growth of the police station
and no sun to ruin any plans
above it.
We need a Lego sun shining without alternative
above a Lego abyss. Young Lego peasants
from a Lego Galilee
taking upon them all the Lego sins and dejections.
We need Lego children singing:
“in the shadow of the Lego cross we sat down and wept.”
A Lego John Lennon singing about
Lego gods and concepts and pains.
Only then will the sun struggle happily
in convulsions. Only then will the world deserve
to be pushed on.
Today it is evening, we are building a Lego police station
and we are watching Cars. The milk
gets warm in the white tin cup.
Nothing, and this is no big talk – nothing
can push us further.
For more of his poems, click here.