Clouds of Stone

By Claudia Ene

The second poem book, "Clouds of Stone", comes to fulfill the temporal trajectory opened by the volume "Fortress on the Shore".
In chronological order, this second tome is the first that should've been published, since it was the fourth of July of 2012 when the poems were reunited but because of several reasons, it appears after almost six years and only in the electronic format.
If "Fortress on the Shore" is divided in three parts: The Innocence, The Mist, The Clear Blue Sky (full of meaning in the personal life of the author and which, afterwards, mark undoubtedly the style, the vision and the relationship with the outer world), "Clouds of Stone" is the book that represents the return to poetry. Is the result of the overwhelming feelings or vital experiences that one assumes and faces, such as in poems like "Here" or "To You". In other poems, "Mothers" and "At the Gate", the moments of non-compliance are tangled with the vision upon her own self that the author receives in a new place, with the longing for those left behind, for the family of which she has separated, but to which remains indestructibly bound.
The sense of "Clouds of Stone", which makes its debut with a defining poem, "I Am", a psychological portrait in a few verses (even so, incomplete, two of the verses have been forever deleted even in the original version, on the paper of the notebook where it had been written), is given by the order of the poems' titles, rather than by the date when they were written. The temporal data might be of interest to someone whose areas of interest regard the near historic present. It can also be of interest the way in which the poetic inspiration works, in "Quarter of an hour", for example, a series of different poems whose creation lasted exactly 15 minutes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Claudia Ene
• Release date: Jan 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370977680

Claudia Ene

Born in 1974, in a small, southern village of Romania, next to the natural border that the Danube makes with Bulgaria, my childhood was a period of mixed emotions, between the happiness of that age, and the fear of living in a communist, dictatorial regime that forbade any expression of free speech and free thinking. When I was 10 years old, my mom decided that it would've be better for my future to move to a city nearby, in order to provide me a better education. For a lot of time, I was convinced that I'll became a doctor. I even prepared for it, since the exams for admittance to the medicine university, at that time, were among the most difficult ones, along with architecture, law and engineering. But then happened the 1989 Revolution and everything changed. Because of my Romanian language teacher, after an exam she gave us, in which we were supposed to comment a poem belonging to Mihai Eminescu, the Cervantes of the Romanian literature, I realized that she was right, that what I really like is to read and to write. So, I started to study English language and Romanian grammar and literature, to prepare for journalism studies, and to recover all the years I had lost without studying these subjects. And since then, it's what I've been doing. After finishing a private journalism school of which I'm proud of, I met my soon-to-be husband in the last two weeks of classes, a fact that, somehow, changed once again my life. So in love and so young, both of us, we got married after only six months after having met each other, and so I postponed my license exams, my hole professional life, since our son said "Here I am". One year after his birth, I started to work for a Romanian television program, a job that I got after passing an exam, since the production house was searching for new employees. It was my first job, the place that I remember with tenderness. Years passed by, so did my husband's life, and what he didn't dare or didn't want to do, I decided to do on my own: leaving Romania and going to live with my kids to a place for which I longed, Madrid. Seven years after arriving in Madrid, I have worked as whatever I could (house cleaning, restaurant kitchens, writing one book and preparing the second, lately making my own political analysis website, raise my kids -one of them is studying English language and literature at the university), and here we are, still.

Book preview

Claudia Ene

Clouds of Stone

Nubes de Piedra

Nori de Piatra

Translation to English and Spanish: Toni Talmaciu

Drawings: Toni Talmaciu

Copyright belong to the author. Forbidden any text or images reproduction, or any unauthorized use of the image for purposes that are not agreed by the author.

Clouds of Stone

I am

I'm the one nobody knows,

Yet, from time to time,

It helps to walk with.

I am the nameless one,

I am the one who does not exist,

Yet whose return you need.

I'm the one who has left,

Yet who is always there,

The one who was, yet who never went away...

20.06.2012

Pencil

From my pencil don’t expect sewn words,

Metaphors and rhymes.

The years have emptied me of decorations.

My hand, without gloves, without caressing

Has learned to write

Like a stone hitting gates

Until they open.

Don't search for hidden truths,

They are all in plain sight;

Just learn to see them,

Learn to listen.

I don't know how to tell you stories

That are not mine,

Stories that I did not live:

Something you'll find in them,

Something to move you,

Something to touch you.

30.06.2012

To lose

How can you know loss,

If you never kissed death?

The lips that spoke to me,

The lips that whispered to me,

The lips that devoured me,

One day accepting, one day denying,

The wine red stained lips,

One day had closed

And will never speak again.

How am I to lend you a soft, warm hand?

My tireless hands,

One day couldn't reach the skies,

They couldn't give life to your hands,

So cold, so silent.

They couldn't flow my blood into yours,

My life into your death.

What they could, was to feel decay,

Rising to them,

Like mountains dressing in snow.

What they could, was to caress your face,

That I watched so much,

That I loved so much.

They could iron your clothes for one last time,

Just to gift them afterwards,

But never touch you

Never dry your feet, before you left.

What to tell you,

When I faced death,

Dueling it, knowing that I would lose?

To tell you, what?

Of my sleepless nights?

Of my lifeless days?

About the breeze you were one night,

Breaking my dream

With the soft, could touch of your hand on my forehead,

With the honey you left on my lips,

Returning the last kiss I gave you;

With the incense with which you perfumed our home

On the saddest Christmas Night,

Searching for you, like a kid searching for gifts,

Without finding you,

Without you to show me how to reach you.

20.06.2012

Roses

From time to time, you’d give me roses.

Yet your roses always withered.

Sometimes, you’d let me see the depths of your soul

In exchange for some tears.

And I know neither how nor why

Your tears were burning my soul so much,

That, afterwards, I couldn’t find myself inside,

Nor could I find you.

So many flowers have passed since then,

And only one rose.

How strange, my love,

Your roses did die, but mine did not.

It became the dust of my being,

It became the shooting stars

That made no wish come true,

Only turn off some lights.

26.05.2012

Mothers

Mother,

They wanted to show me what pain is;

They tried to lower me from the clouds,

Destroying the little serenity

That I still had inside.

They tainted walls, without knowing if I like it or not,

They laughed of my flowers, in my balcony,

Killing them with so much shadow.

What do they know of a little girl

Who was crying at midnight,

Praying to God not to take you,

Not to leave me alone,

When you were as white as the sheets of that hospital?

That your blood, running away from your veins,

Was making me bleed too?

What do they know about the suffering of my grandparents,

Punished to see each day a son

That will never bring offspring,

Grown like a tree, and extinguishing

In silence, like the fire?

What do they know about

The days when he almost drowned,

Or when he would get lost in the fields?

What do they know about the tears of my grandmother?

About my trembling soul?

Yes, they wanted to show me the suffering,

Without knowing how it is to always live with it.

Without knowing that you keep

My books that are still to be written,

My destiny, that is still to fulfill.

25.06.2012

At the gate

You are preparing to leave,

I have already left.

Paths that