Concours de poésie

Diana Ștefănescu, Poetry, Group IV

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Diana Ștefănescu participates in the “Poetry” Section of the English Category, International Literary Creation Contest, 3rd Edition, from București, Romania and is 54 years old. We thank her for this participation and wish her success.

Diploma
Three Guardian Angels

The morbid disease wrapping silently around the artery walls,
Widening them, thickening them, weakening them, day by day,
You raise your offspring, you do your work, unawares the pain calls! 
So sharp it is you ask God what was wrong you have to pay.

Saccular snake coiling insidiously around the aortic walls,
Feeling so comfortable, in no time, it went to nest:
The right femoral artery, the left, then to the knee it falls,
To the popliteal artery which grows while the snake is doing its best. 
 
 Waiting for you to ask for help, you find him in his little room –
Reads the CT, the CD, the blood tests, not content with the sight;
Asks for a contrast dye CT for a clear picture, and soon!
How much God loved us if he gave us our sleep in the night!

Stuffed with layers of blood clot, blinding everyone with blood,
Blood runs, blood sprinkles, there’s blood all around,
Fighting hideously for life, it finally dies under the surgeon’s cut.
The artery sewn, everyone’s leaving the surgical ward.

The snake is left behind, its corpse is surely good to analyze:
Detect the stagnant blood of a pseudoaneurysm or an aneurysm,
To make sure there is no other form of death inside,
To  try and find the secret of the devilish mechanism.


Driving along an empty field, the doctor stops the car and starts to cry -
Recalls his visit: “Am I cured?” asked the patient.
“You’ll be fine.” He looks up, his forehead hitting the sky.
He knows he tricked death into coming later.

The surgeon hopes.  He knows he’ll have to go back to his strife.
The daughter hopes. She’s meeting God to treat her sore.
The patient hopes. He knows the doctor’s giving back his life.
In the laboratory, the doctors are searching for the devil’s core.

Right internal iliac artery aneurysm, the multi-headed snake is back!
The three of them again, they look each other in the eye
“I really am bewildered! I don’t know which one to attack!”
“You’ll find out in the operating theatre.” the Guardian Angels sigh.



The unique word

I do not know how I should continue using words,
since they have not proved mind-saving,
they have not saved relationships, but quite the opposite,
they have helped them drown,
they have not helped opposing parties come to peace,
and once started, wars were never helped by words.
Words, as well as many of the things around us, 
are something familiar, at hand, and used by almost everyone
to buy and sell different things and love,
illusions and deceiving images.
Man invented so many words, but they did not live up
to man’s expectations, maybe because man himself
did not live up to the initial word invented by God.
What I am doing, by writing,  is try to find the unique word,
by pronouncing it, I live with the illusion
that a new, ingenuous world will come to life.


Nobody has told me

Although nobody has told me any such thing,
I have always known that life in the human society
is very complicated and extremely hard
but I did not go as far with the intuition
as it can get at times.

What we read about the unfortunate times of the past,
is something we take a distance from,
the mind does not want to take in
and it is right in its attempt to protect us.

We go through our lives not thinking about…
ignoring details, turning our eyes away from certain things,
happiness is the discipline of not seeing what is not good for you to see.

Love is the ability of building into the beloved person
and having the willingness to believe
that your construction, what you have added to the portrait ,
is the real one.

How many of us have the courage to rip 
the attire that has never fitted
and see the portrait crumble instantly the features we have put in,
revealing the former beloved person?

What we have always known
is not something always comfortable to see.