Brother, today you have taught me yet another Romanian word—toaca! Lovely word, and duly resonant. I know in Greek the item it names as a semantron, that sounding board of chestnut struck with a mallet to call the monks to prayer. Lovely words, bringing back to mind my many weeks wandering the Holy Mountain in search of prayer.
May I say that your poems are serving as a semantron, a toaca, their rhythms calling me into the selfsame stillness I have come to associate with prayer, have come to identify as prayer.
Your equating the poet with a circus monkey is initially a welcome and gentle joke, but your move to clarifying that the poet is “the kind of monkey that when she grows up is suddenly crushed by sorrow” sobers me up, brushes away my grin, and I am nodding in agreement with “through her pain and through the laughter of the spectators, by the time she gets old, she almost turns into a human being.”
Ouch. Oy. Yes.
Our swinging thirty meters high with the trapeze rung in one hand while crossing ourselves with the other, then diving from those thirty meters into the half-filled baptismal font...yes. Yes, the act is terrifying, and essential to our secret joy.