ANDRADA COSTOIU - POEMS

Andrada Costoiu is a Tobis Fellow at the University of Irvine California and a graduate student at University of Illinois of Chicago, currently finishing her Phd in Political Science. She has published works in the field of politics, on immigration and identity issues. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Identity and Migration Studies and she has also been published by Cambridge Scholars.
She is an emerging poet that enjoys writing on the deep sense of life, on philosophical questions and on issues related to cultural values. She has previously published poems by Spill Words Press. She is also the author of the novel Under the Iron Curtain, which is set up in communist Romania. You can find more of her writing at her personal blog: a-passion4life.com, where she frequently writes about her experiences, events and people that are an inspiration to her.

​The nameless child

​The bomb that fell flattened his world,
And drew corridors of fire
That led everywhere and nowhere,
Toward a future that kept hanging.
 
The tearless silence was floating,
Dressed with silk black cap,
As faith was rewriting the lists
For new havens.
 
His eyes were closed, but it was bright inside,
He remembered the taste of chocolate
And how he ran up and down the hills
Over the desert.


He will soon hear the others,
Crawling like him, on their canes of hope,
Their skills got sharper every time.


He’ll join them in the quest for 
Their food for tomorrow:
Wild mushrooms and rabbits.
Sometimes they will go by the airfield,
Wondering loud where the storks were,
And why was their place taken by uniformed men.
 
He felt his body burning,
Heard shouting, faint, then rising,
He smelled his father pomade and felt the clutching of his arms.
He was tired of running in a race that had no stopwatch, 
Besides he already won,
Of all the things, this war has never been able to embargo his dreams.

I would like to continue

​I would like to continue, until it ends,
Everything ends, doesn’t it? Or maybe it doesn’t…..
Some physicist says that there is no such thing as the past and future,
And that the order of time is not a one-way street.
 
I try to believe him, but I cannot devoid myself of the trace of temporality,
And strangely enough, it doesn’t bother me.
My silent thoughts summon and acknowledge past memories,
And piece by piece, each memory is filled with love, fear, desire or passion.
 
From my smallness I see the footprints of our humanity,
It’s not silent and aimless,
It makes me smile watching how we are all striving and longing to get what we desperately want,
And I can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
 
We don’t suffer from a tragic misconception of time,
We take what we understand and we strive to understand more.
We have time. Everything that doesn’t work will work one day,
And I would like to continue. 
 

A new Gertrude Bell for the Atlantis of the Sands ​

​Another time, same wind gusts are witness,
to a world of ever changing, uncharted sands of red and tan. 
No tribal conflicts are troubling this place,
The hammer of the modern world has already been cast.
 
I hear the music of the shifting dunes
Chanting to worlds that have been here long before the present,
With a faint hum, low throated, drum like sealing sound.
 
Glowing under the moon, the lights of a thousand stars hanging from the sky,
Drench the desert like whiffs of wisdom.
I know, 
That I have lived my entire life in the company of them,
Kneeling together to the same universe,
Feeling the life force.
 
Some girls wear different hats, 
Mine is to thread the beads of civilization into the eternal loop,
and prove that that nothing disappears into the unknown.
I have been searching to make the Atlantis of the Sands real,
To find the lost city that was forgotten for thousands of years.
I keep planning my route,
And this is certainly the most spectacular adventure of my life.
 
My feet are aching, for days I’ve been begging for new feet, new arms,
stoic in my quest that I hope to carry through the next day and on.
 
Tonight, I feel so thirsty,
Drinking water from my canteen, barefoot,
I see my crew stretching, 
The feeble sounds of their hymn sung in unison
Express visions of life that undulate across miles of silent sand.
“We’ll go at first light”, says the main porter,
 I nod, 
Knowing that the greatest honor bestowed upon us humans is survival.
Tomorrow is another day,
Neither bound nor free, we will keep walking.
 
We’re a band of loyal warriors fighting to assemble the puzzle that reveals the truth:
The past, the present, and the future are all connected,
We don’t own time, but we do own our history.
 
I believe in us,
Nothing is dust in the wind
And our songs will not fade mute.
Ancient flames of light flicker inside us,
Giving us purpose,
We will dive and emerge from the sea currents of time,
And trace past and present trails of human survival and civilization.