Excerpt

Chapter Eight
The ringing of the alarm clock awakened Tyne. She opened her eyes
to glare at the offending timepiece on the desk across the room. To
heck with it. She closed her eyes and snuggled again into her pillow.
Moe bounced from her bed and grabbed the clock to shut it off.
“Come on, sleepyhead. Get out of that sack. Don’t you know what
day this is?”
Tyne forced her eyes open. Moe, standing in the middle of the
room in her short nightshirt, stretched and yawned. “How can you
sleep this morning? We’ve been waiting three years for this day.” She
walked to the door to turn on the ceiling light.
Tyne blinked and pulled the sheet up to shield her eyes from the
sudden brightness. “What day … oh yeah, so it is. Our last day of
training.”
“You don’t sound very excited.” Moe grabbed her dressing gown
from the chair and shrugged into it.
“Believe it or not, I feel a little sad.”
“Oh come on, Moon River. What’s to be sad about? We’ll still be
at the Holy Cross if that’s what’s worrying you, and you’ll be doing
what you like best – helping to cut people up.”
Tyne got up, walked to the dresser and began to brush her hair.
“I didn’t tell Curly when I saw her yesterday that I’m going to be
working in surgery. I thought it would be like rubbing salt into the
wound.”
“That was good of you, but she’ll find out sooner or later. How’s
she doing, anyway?”
Tyne reached for her dressing gown. “Okay, I suppose.”

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THE SEAGULLS FROM TRANSYLVANIA
This thorough country called nature
Lost breath of the heaven’s dragons
And from the wide waters of the sea deep from the very beginnings,
Even before the old Pannonian Sea
Added its extensions here,
Yes, this tenacious natural amphitheatre,
Full of thick forests,
Still silencing the Romans’ language,
This Transylvania is
Both the mountain shuddering with memory
And the fairy tale of the eyes suggesting the morning,
And especially the mild anxiety of some seagulls,
By their generations’ adage,
Becoming smaller and more grey
than their ancestors,
Living signs of the millennia,
Of the seas fatally squeezed into rivers,
In whose name there is a constant whisper:
The Someş, the Mureş, the Criş, the Criş, the Criş5 …
How could I not have recognized,
Even if I had not known what they were,
The thin quest of these Transylvanian seagulls

Gravely questioning the waves of my Criş River
And floating almost weightlessly,
As the poplar’s seeds fall;
Who can know if the absolute
Is not the forgotten song
Of the Transylvanian seagull?

5 Rivers from Transylvania

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Tenth Canto
I discover eloquence in ash falling
like opened wishes of thirsty lips
and marking my share of urgency
I retract the curtain to reveal
an orchestra and chorus harmonies in
celestial reverb with the dynamism
of a faceless entity that dresses itself
in crimson riding greed on
some apocalyptic horse carrying
conversion coercion assimilation
proselytizing consequence of infidels
the necessity of martyrdom which started in
primeval depths of Miseria Dura
the end justifying any means with colorful
insignia of archons and beacons of
lords and crests flying high potent
cross banners unfolding speed to
deep grooves and flattening the firm virgin’s
breast the zealot’s façade
transforms into wrinkled face of the moon
over me standing on the steep-cut road
indifferent to his imminent demise
I witness a beheading and
everything shifts right
powered by a limited company acting as if
controlling infinite growth as if reaching no end
as the wise dandelion retains
bitterness for blood
virulence spread on faith’s
path unflinching curtain asks the same
question and the off-tune chorus
answers: I can do better

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763092