A long poem-for me-about my trip to Romania a few years back. Several Romanians have taken issue with it but I found their country fascinating. Every nation has it’s problems, challenges and usually, a turbulent history.

POVs

DAY 1

At Heathrow I am wan, so pooped my heart quits
palpitating. I stop scrutinizing threat level colour codes,
unattended backpacks, retreat to my insignificance,
listen as a wife recites The London Times,
as foreign to me as Rome’s Il Messaggero. Katrina who?
These are disturbing times, dear. Cartoonist hit lists.
Boils of slam. Novelist fatwas. Bird flu dread.
Spread by beak or spicy chicken wing?
Off to hotbed of Romania, host to more than one virus.
Online scamming. Corruption. HIV. European Union
bid in peril. Does the average Brit give a feck?
Do rhetorical questions require a question mark?

DAY 2

Bucharest terminal quiet but for the cabbies. I nearly miss
foundation staffer Caroline’s hand-inked sign.
She leads me to a young American with a Welsh name
and an English woman with a broken tooth. Wait here
while we search for the poet laureate of New Hampshire’s
luggage. Not another reality show, please. Pale silhouettes
amble past a riot of architecture, crepuscular on the banks
of the Dâmboviţa. Baroque. Modern. Renaissance. Gothic.
Squat, Soviet blocks abut opulent cathedrals.

DAY 3

Currency—lei—so overwhelms me with zeros I don’t buy
books or icons of Mary and the saints. Resistance heroes
in stone. An Arcul de Triumf and a monument
to the 89 coup d’état, Memorial of Rebirth, a tall, marble
pillar and orb locals scorn as the toothpick and the olive.
Redheads rule Romania now, mine violet in the gamut of tints,
ox blood to bozo carrot. I don’t blend in. Women in heavy kohl
stumble on cobblestones. Toward vogue. Glamazons vying
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