The train rides empty on the side of the river
Inhabited only by a few commuters and robbers
After crossing the steel bridge it sings like a whale
Dragging itself on the ground like an electric snake

Up the hill is the old dungeon destroyed by the peasants
And the forest of oak and bullfrogs and blueberries
People die of sickenesses in the huts near the villas
And the community events are football and drinking

The railway-station is blocked with rust-brown freight cars
And the train is now a memory of the other life lived right here
Like the memories of an embrion heart beating inside the woman
The train is no longer part of the village – has its own way alone

Another life the good one though we not know not even now
What was so particularly good about it maybe the stolen beer
The stolen meat and the kindness of the train official letting you go
Inside only a game of cards is played and a woman reads the Time

The card-players are the workers, the last workers – working
But they still have time to laugh eat pig-lard and muse at the
Colored drawings of the cards with servants, knights, women,
And Kings and the woman is just a woman going to visit her cousin.

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Felix Rian Constantinescu is an Andreescian poet, naive religious, sickly Christian.

Photo: Soroush Karimi