Corina Junghiatu - Two poems and an essay
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Corina Junghiatu
METAMORPHOSIS OF TIME
Time...
a translucent secretion of memory,
the obscure gland of the universe,
dreaming its own decay
in ancient effigies and newborn illusions.
I do not hear it in the dragging seconds,
but in the spasm of a flower as it blooms
and dies within the same trembling eyelash of light.
Time is a liquid spiral,
a vertebrate of the moment,
slowly absorbing me,
pushing me deeper and deeper
into the formless core of the fractured instant.
Time
takes from me, gives to me, and breaks me,
with the same tender amnesia
that seems to be its very essence.
And I...
remain a child,
still writing with a misty finger
on the knotted stained-glass of reality,
believing that dreams are nothing but
time in its purest form.
I AM THE SHADOW.
In the beginning,
I was an eyelash of darkness,
born in the interstice
between two pulses of light,
when God blinked,
and His lashes trembled across the void,
drawing mayflies upon the retina of nothingness.
I am that drawing,
a spectral calligraphy
on the parchment between worlds,
a fractal lace where time forgets its direction.
I am the Shadow,
not the opposite of light,
but its testimony.
I am the echo left
after the lights went out
in the secret hall of Creation.
Without me, light has no borders.
And without borders, what is light?
A wandering. A waste of the Absolute.
I am the Shadow,
child of primordial darkness,
born in the moment when God,
weary of so much eternity,
blinked…
and with that divine pause,
He whispered the world into being.
………………………………………..
ROOTS AND WINGS
An Essay on Identity, Origins, and Inner Freedom
by Corina Junghiatu
Every human being is born in a certain time and place. But who is he, in this “here” and “now”? Man is not merely a biological being, but an articulated mystery, caught between the calling of his origins and the temptation of flight. Roots and wings are not opposites; they are, in a profound sense, two forms of becoming into being.
Identity is not a certificate. It is a mystery. It cannot be defined, it must be lived. To know who you are means to know for whom you were made. And if you do not know why God gave you a face, you end up living like a shadow, mimicking the human.
Roots are not mere anchors. They do not bind us, they nourish us. They do not hinder our journey, they give us direction. To return to one’s origin is not regression, but foundation. For what is man without the memory of his beginning? A dissipated mist, a flower without a stem. Roots teach us silence, patience, and continuity. Through them, we come to understand the meaning of belonging: to a people, to a language, to a shared suffering, to a way of seeing the world.
But it is not enough to delve into the soil from which you were born. Within man lies a need for verticality, for emerging from the self, for fulfillment beyond the given self. This is where wings appear. Inner freedom is not gained through rupture, but through sublimation. Wings do not sever roots; they grow from their strength. Wings without roots become impotence. Roots without wings become stagnation. Only together do they create in man a vertical flight: from earth to sky, from suffering to light, from limitation to eternal becoming.
Identity, ultimately, is not a given, it is a becoming. We are not, we are in the making. But not just anyhow. We become through the tension between what binds us and what calls us. To be yourself means to be more than what you are, but never without what you have been.
Thus, the complete human is the one who knows his roots and does not despise them, but who also dares to stretch his wings. He is the one who knows that freedom is not escape, but a form of assumption. It is not a leap into the void, but a rising into meaning.
Roots and wings… two faces of the same journey: the journey toward the self. And to arrive at the self, that is the only path worth walking.
Modern man imagines he is free because he has severed his roots. But the tree uprooted from the earth does not fly, it decays. Freedom does not mean to detach from what gave you birth, but to rise precisely from that soil of clay, blood, and prayer. Any wing that does not know the root is but an illusion of flight.
Our origin is not merely biological. We are the children of ancestral suffering, bearers of a cross carried across centuries. To sever ourselves from that memory is to become spiritual illiterates. To be a whole human means to carry within oneself the dust of our grandparents, the voice of our mother, and the pain of history.
