Empty Lot at Night

Loneliness is a town
Where everyone else is dead.
The streets are clean,
The street-markets empty,
Suddenly everything’s in a true light
Through being deserted – exactly
The way it was meant to be.
Loneliness is a city
Where it’s always snowing  
Prodigiously, and no footsteps ever
Profane the layered
Drift of the light.
And you alone, the unsleeping eye
Keeping an eye on the sleepers, you  
See, comprehend, and can’t have enough
Of a silence so pristine
Nobody fights there,
Nobody’s lied to,
And even the tear in the eye  
Of the abandoned animal
Is too pure to hurt.
On the border
Between suffering and death,
Loneliness is a happy town.


Loneliness, by Ana Blandiana (trans. by Seamus Heaney)