Helsingør

Miruna Fulgeanu

Didn’t; won’t; never ask anymore. Only spoke what I wanted:

to see Hamlet’s castle, and we were there. The sky

was light on the shoulders, as it is in the North, and I had

that blue certainty of a curse. Sergeant of distance,

the sea was the sea. Under its pressures, I thought

I could learn to love the water life. We walked the harbor

between the furled sails of the rich and a row

of Scandi buildings, all glass & perpendicularity & angels.

At the castle, I told the tourist group about Ophelia,

getting the flowers all wrong: I said rosemary’s for pelvic ennui;

bluebell for the ache of growing unreal in happy times. I didn’t ask for

him; never. At times I felt nothing at all,

at other times I was sick with my being, especially when I felt it melding.

The tourists were unimpressed with me, I with them.

The day was a time in the middle of making loves. This is what I learnt:

the feeling is trustworthy, like wooden floorboards, and its erasure is not.

The civilized Danish were indoors, and on the way back

we had gelato & accordion sounds, ghosts of the old port.

We walked together against the breeze, the street empty, nothing alive

underwater, and above 2 bluethroats making lovesounds

at each other, hello, sweet prince, hello.

Miruna Fulgeanu is a Romanian-born poet and translator living in London. Her work has appeared in UK magazines such as Poetry London, The Rialto, and Pain, and in 2022 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship.
Originally published:
October 4, 2023

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