Lucian Blaga

Lucian Blaga took a while
to speak as a child, just as I
took ages to see the bats smile,
as an adult, on evening sky.

At five, he went to his mother,
and spoke to her fluently,
at her bedside, by covering
his eyes, with his hands congruent

like sloped shed eaves. I could just glimpse
bats, before seeing them full-on;
but just now, I saw a pair winch
themselves by daylight, body gone,

as silence spoke in place of speech.
And moonbeam words tap hearing’s beach.

Woodford Halse - 24 August 2025

Lucian Blaga ( 1895 - 1961 ) was Romania’s leading 20th century poet. In relation to him, I was something like the bat, because his death, and my mother’s pregnancy of me, overlapped.

He died on 6 May 1961. I was born on 29 October that year. I paraphrase a line from his poem Tacere ( Silence ) in the final line above. He was an important poet, because he engaged with Science, and regarded philosophy as an artform, rather like his Sicilian counterparts.

If one reads his Tacere poem carefuly and compares it to mine, you may discern his “ancestral” effect on me, that I am now crediting him with, from when language was like those moonbeams.

By a pair, I do not mean there were two bats today.

The Anglosphere has become a bit of a bubble. We are missing out on these poetic alternatives. By the way, we saw the daytime bat this afternoon at Greatworth in the Cherwell Valley, having pulled over to let another vehicle pass on a narrow village street. I had not seen one in full daylight before. Only in 2004 did I recognise a bat full-on. Once I saw one on a white midsummer evening, at Osney Island in Oxford.

This poem is written in thanks for Romanian herbal medicines, which do me a power of good, given as a gift to me by a Romanian family.