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About the Eyes

“About the Eyes” – a collaboration with the talented musicians Harvey Welsh and Chris Holly. I love their gentle conversation with the poem.

I wrote this a while ago, but under this new way of living, I think now it is most important than ever to acknowledge that we all live under the same sun, that we are all equal.

I imagined 4 different characters, with different languages, different eyes colour and different life experience. They are made by the different memories each of them carries.

The black eyes remember storms, wars and their mother, trying to find her children’s next piece of bread. Even when they found peace, living in a different country, a country of blue-eyed people, the memories come back.

The green eyes remember different kind of storms and Spring nights.

The brown eyes remember the enchanted forest of their childhood.

The blue eyes have never known famine and they reassure the black eyes that they will never have to worry about the bread.

Straight Up!

About this poem:

Some 20 years ago, I set out to explore the world. I was lucky enough to do so; I went around the globe 3 times and a half. but I was always the traveller and never the settler. Until the right time came.

I have always felt permanently lost in translation. Thinking in one language while you speak another one allows for lots of funny conversations, let me tell you.

But then, one day I met Jacqui and Lauren. They were two brave women running a Mother Tongue multicultural poetry workshop and they have shown me how to put my puzzle together.
Everything changed since then.

Now, when people find out I am Romanian, most of the times the question I get is if I speak Russian. I don’t. However, quite a few people asked me in the past months if I write in Italian. It’s a more appropriate question, given that we learned Latin as a mandatory subject in school. I don’t know a lot of Italian, sadly, but I thought I’d try it anyway and I played with a couple of words i learned in my travels.

I don’t know how many of you remember a movie called “The Point”. It is the story of Oblio, the only round-headed person in the Pointed Village, where it is the law that everything and everyone must have a point. Because he is different, he gets banished to the Pointless Forrest but in the end he manages to prove that even seemingly pointless things do have a point.
As a child, I was inspired by his journey, which is one of self-discovery and uncovering truth. This poem is just that: being different in an oddly shaped world. And my close friends will even know where the Iron Maiden reference is in this text 🙂