poems by constantin severin

   HILMA AF KLINT
  
 in my childhood  I used to look for owl nests between sight and sound
 in the garden of Karlberg Palace to learn how to see the timelessness
 I felt as even in my dreams I was followed by large spherical eyes with white eyelids
 all the colors of the day sprouted like seeds in a black cube
 from which spikes of words grew: heart time cross fruit temple star island
 flower tree sphere water triangle logarithmic spiral lotus eye hourglass
 words are nocturnal seeds in the sight of God
  
 in my youth I began to paint portraits and landscapes with memory-blind eyes
 until Blavatsky and Steiner's books or the De Fem group meditations
 brought back to my burning heart the images of childhood with touches of eternity 
 gradually I mapped the soul and the invisible with my eyes empty of the past
 and maybe I wouldn't have deciphered the astral clouds without Grandpa Gustav's sea maps
 without the love of my blind mother my girlfriends and my heavenly guide Amaliel
 the one who led my hand on the white canvas with the accuracy of lightning
  
 we are unreal shadows of the real world that stops at the gates of the retina
 to paint means to be shaped by the timeless event not by the historical one
 I wanted to bring to the world the light roots of things
 the sacred geometry gushing from the deep fountains of the invisible
 I experienced the comet touching the epidermis on my fingers intensely
 and the deepening of the line of life by the spiritual masters of the quantum world
 I would have cut off my hand with which I was painting without the revelation of the archetypal universe
  
 I discovered eyes everywhere in the deserted field in the sky on the wings of butterflies
 on sister Hermina's pall on beech leaves and ancient Greek columns
 thousands of glances kept nestling in my empty orbits
 to nibble the iris of a color on the canvases painted with Amaliel
 which I could only hide from the blind eyes of the people around me
 I felt that humanity was not ready to understand my paintings
 they could not open the eyes to a world that would last forever
  
 I loved life rising like dew from the syllables of prayer
 and I let the inner wounds flourishing in cosmic forms
 tattooed with mysterious words maps and mathematical diagrams
 sometimes I felt like I was being written by a hand from a parallel universe
 a strange convulsive cocoon shaken out of a celestial calligraphy
 with wide-open letters for the mystery of the gaze
 to see means to believe in a world which can’t be seen
  
 Suceava, October 22, 2020 

 LIN FENGMIAN
  
 my art was an intense story about harmony colour and emotion
 twinned in the celestial promontory that unites the West with the East
 but how difficult it is to embrace in one heart two worlds with different roots
 and how acute the loneliness is when you wander aimlessly on the paths between them
 accompanied only by the music of the ample and rhythmic movements of the brush
 at a time when history was the Cinderella of the world
 I banished my nightmares by painting the Lady with the Flute on rice paper
  
 everything I learned in Paris from Van Gogh's professor Matisse and Modigliani
 I melted frantically into the crucible of Chinese sensibility and spirituality
 stone engravings from the Han Dynasty drawings on Song and Yuan porcelain
 they directed my hand and the inner rhythm of the light gushing from the depths
 but the fear of being cursed in the newspapers forced me to destroy with jets of water
 expressionist paintings from Pain and Humanity series and throw them in the toilet
 my suffering absorbed in the prison cell all the Pain of Mankind
  
 I painted Chinese feelings with Western techniques and visions
 and I described human despair through female nudes
 with contorted figures and expressionist screams worthy of Munch
 and in the four years behind bars I found my inner self 
 despite all the persecutions humiliations and punishments
 and I searched anxiously for a nest for the soul on plants portative
 a place pulsating like a heart between the thunder bird and the bird of paradise
  
 I shaped my character by meditating on Lao Zi's words
 and I defended myself against the plagues of the century with all goodness and love
 alone I watched my thoughts words and actions
 and in the powder of love stories and memories of China Paris Munich and Hong Kong
 I searched restlessness and desperately the inner music
 even when the trail of history's blood entered my orbits
 and it flowed in myriads of red hourglasses through the pores of the rice paper
  
 in the absence of art music and stories the social blood dries up
 only the love of creation kept my heart serene in the midst of the storm
 and it made me roam spaces beyond the visible world
 and when the brush sometimes touched Oedipus' half-open eyes
 I shuddered to feel that man is stronger than destiny
 and I supported my soul with the most beautiful memory
 the winged rainbow of hundreds of Mandarin ducks from my native village
  
 Suceava, December 13, 2020 

 PAUL KLEE
  
 In my youth I often played the violin in front of the easel
 trying to paint music the simultaneous birth of sounds and colors
 until I touched the strings of light in my blood with my soul
 I was not drawing lines but I was trying to capture the throb of drawing lines
 all mine were musicians and my life was a perpetual dance
 of images words and musical spellings to touch the heart of the invisible
 I have always dreamed of a polyphonic art springing from primordial powers
  
 color has taken over me since 1914 after the trip to Tunisia
 when I leisurely sipped the concentrated essence of the Arabian nights
 and I began to read the real with the nocturnal senses of light
 together with the Bauhaus students I wanted to be beyond fashion
 to feel like a newborn in the midst of the raging world
 which later put my "degenerate" art at the forefront of infamy
 the more horrible the world becomes the more abstract art becomes
  
 intimacy with death was a leitmotif of my life
 after my good artist friends August Macke and Franz Marc
 have been senselessly sacrificed in the First World War
 since then I've kept my grandfather's Toledo dagger in the violin box
 which when I was alone mirrored my swollen face from the disease
 music and death are more alive than ever when they share
 the same body from which suffering bites deeply with lightning arpeggios
  
 in the last year of my life I saved 1,200 works from the clutches of death
 I could barely hold the brush in my hands with thickened skin
 I had edema all over my skin and joint pain high blood pressure
 sometimes I was dizzy when I looked in the mirror at my bruised face
 with shiny skin and stretched with intense streaks of African mask
 but I kept looking hard for the color-place where the brain
 and the universe embraces above all the pains of the world
  
 I knew from Einstein that every moment is the pollen of a new universe
 and I understood that art does not render the visible but makes the visible
 which lies hidden in the folds of the unseen worlds and in ancient myths
 I wanted to rewrite the fairy tales that haunt me through my childhood dreams
 to look for the thrill of simplicity by moving lines and rhythms in space
 through color to turn your eyes into sonic rumbles
 but one day I will sit nowhere with an angel beside me
  
 Suceava, January 20, 2021
  
   

Constantin Severin is a Romanian writer and visual artist, founder and proponent of Archetypal Expressionism, a highly regarded global art movement, which he founded in Bukovina, in 2001. A graduate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, he has published ten books of poetry, essays and fiction. One of his poems was included in the 2014 World Literature Today anthology, After the Wall Fell: Dispatches from Central Europe (1989–2014), aimed at popularizing post-Wende Central European literature on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Severin’s conceptual art and artworks have appeared in Artdaily, World Literature Today, Trafika Europe, It’s Liquid, Levure littéraire, Empireuma, Contemporanul, Vatra, Arkitera, Glare Magazine, Cuadernos del Ateneo, Dance, Media Japan, and other international art and literary magazines.
 Website: http://constantinseverin.ro/
  
      Constantin Severin este scriitor și artist vizual, fondator și promotor al Expresionismului Arhetipal, o mișcare artistică de impact global, pe care a înființat-o în Bucovina, în anul 2001. Absolvent al cursului internațional de scriere creativă de la Universitatea Iowa, el a publicat zece cărți de poezie, eseuri și romane. Unul dintre poemele sale a fost inclus în antologia realizată în 2014 de World Literature Today, După Căderea Zidului: Referințe din Europa Centrală (1989-2014), care și-a propus să facă mai cunoscută literatura central-europeană la cea de-a 25-a aniversare a căderii Zidului Berlinului. Lucrări și comentarii despre arta conceptuală a lui Severin au apărut în Artdaily, World Literature Today, Trafika Europe, It’s Liquid, Levure littéraire, Empireuma, Contemporanul, Vatra, Arkitera, Glare Magazine, Cuadernos del Ateneo, Dance, Media Japan și în alte reviste literare și de artă internaționale. 
  
 Website: http://constantinseverin.ro/