Two poems by Cecilia-Anca Popescu

Mango

I open a mango fruit
Meticulously, voluptuously
Its smell takes my memory
On its usual weird route.

Each slice as it slowly melts
Feels like a drop from your being
Sweet poison impairing my seeing
As in my blood it deeply gets.

And I cannot stop
I continue to eat
Until you live in me complete
Or dead poisoned I drop.

Reborn

I wish to lie down on the ground,
Nobody to sense my presence around.
The soil to swallow my last bit of worry,
I don’t have to say anymore I’m sorry.

And then to stand up from my muddy bath
Purified, knowing my real path.
The world will find me everywhere around
As a pure breeze and a calming sound.

Cecilia-Anca Popescu left Romania in 1993, shortly after the Revolution. Today she is managing a chemical lab in her country of adoption. Burdened with the nostalgia of every Romanian immigrant, Cecilia-Anca Popescu writes in her poems about the drama of the expat and about her life experiences, whose mysteries could only be solved in the crucible of the creative act.

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