By Andrada Costoiu

The artist’s prison

Your fingers are dancing molding the clay,
In shapes that your heart has requested,
Trembling,
Touching with the force and desire of your inmate thoughts,
That promise to become something.

You clothing, covered in the black ash of your past creations,
Is overheating your arms and legs,
Your red and blistered palms are as red and as raw as you feel inside.
You stare for a moment,
The mold that you shaped is delivering confidential information about your soul.

Afraid to share it, you put it in a dark corner of a room,
You grin, willing it safe of peering eyes.

Outside is dark and the gravel sounds under your feet,
You walk away, vulnerable,
Passing and nodding at people,
Hiding your red and blistered palms in your pockets.

###

Hear your soul

Bemused from the perusal,
Of walks through the world’s faiths,
You’re seating at the table of your life,
With present and the future you,
Still searching for enlightenment,
Still wishing that it is much more that you knew.

Define the undefined, and feel it!
Your animated consciousness does that everyday,
Then why to find the answer,
To soul and its existence,
Is still uncharted way?

Behold the contradiction, the chatter of two sides,
As far apart as ever, both struggle to be guides.
One says that it’s your body the vessel for your soul,
The other that these two are indivisible and whole.

The inner music of your thoughts secretly shouts: ”I am immortal”!
Convincing, but certainly revised by your sense of the natural world.

Your heart pulsing beneath your chest breathes life,
You think, maybe your story didn’t last long enough to know the answer.
But then you lock eyes with yourself in the mirror,
You see,
Your soul, the silent actor,
Sealed tightly with the corks of your unfettered nature,
Assimilating, crystallizing, metabolizing,
The pain and the pleasure, the gain and the loss,
The hideous and the lovely, the demonic and the divine!
You feel,
Yourself emerging countless times,
With purpose and determination,
Shoving away in scorn,
A vast blind history of explanations,
Of our origins and of the destiny of being born!

The chatter quiets and you listen,
The waters of your mind are clear and quiet,
And in their depths you see the wisdom of the untold aeons of time,
The energy and love,
Unquestioning, complete,
Beautiful and hopeful,
Becoming you.

###

Andrada Costoiu 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.
As a literary author, her poems have appeared in international journals (Spill Words Press). She is also the author of the upcoming 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.