Lucia Cherciu was born in Romania and has lived in the United States since 1995.
She is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY/Dutchess in Poughkeepsie, New York. Cherciu’s writing has appeared in Connecticut Review, Cortland Review, Memoir (and), Legacies, Spillway, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Off the Coast, and in other literary magazines, both in Romanian and in English. Her book of poetry Lepădarea de Limbă (The Abandonment of Language) was published in 2009 by Editura Vinea in Bucharest. Her second book Altoiul Râsului (Grafted Laughter) was published by Editura Brumar in 2010.
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“How Do You Forget Your Native Language?”
As long as friends
build bread ovens in their backyard
after old patterns,
with all those who have left,
I feel the tide of the river
waving its rhythm of words.
A carved baby crib swings
on the porch, where an eighty-year-old woman
hums to her great-granddaughter, waits
for the sunset when the mother returns
to feed them both and make them
smile with no teeth.
Bake me a dozen sweet breads for Easter,
let cauldrons of stuffed grape leaves
simmer outside on an open fire.
I paid my leaving with salt and swords:
in every sentence in another
language, I have tasted the succor
of longing, the wine of your vineyards.
I traded the syntax of your arches,
your alternations of hill and valley,
for words on the tip of the tongue,
hesitations of songs nobody can finish,
a choir nobody can join.
At night, I leave the gates open
for my father, who, tipsy,
didn’t find his way home.