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Foreword and Anthology

At first, there were almost ten years in which I secretly burnt for cosmic poetry under a totalitarian regime that excluded freedom of creation.  

But after the Romanian anticommunist revolution, in 1990 I began to dream of a cosmopoetry festival. For this I made three major steps:

1. I created a small group of cosmopoets in Bucharest.
2. I published in the Romanian many of my cosmopoems written in 1980s as the Spaceman Sazartinus trilogy (Space Morgana, The Space Wild Horses and Renaissance, Polidor Publishing House, Bucharest, 1993-1994), which was followed in 1995 by my English anthology Spaceman Sazartinus' Diary - "Science Fiction", "Astro" and "Fantasy" Cosmopoems (illustrated by Mircea Muresanu and launched at the International Meteor Organization Conferences in 1995 and 1996).
3. I looked for a medium interested in hosting this possible festival (and able to give birth to other poets of the Cosmos), and I found it at the annual national cultural-astronomical event "Perseids", founded in 1993 by Valentin Grigore and the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM.
   Thus, at the end of 1995, Valentin Grigore (president and founder of SARM since 1993) and I decided to organize in August 1996 the first edition of SARM's Cosmopoetry Festival, inspired from Romanian and world traditions in cosmic poetry, astronomical education and my Spaceman Sazartinus' "cosmopoetical handbook". I also initiated 4 printed mini-publications (the most important of them named "Sazartinia Festival - Space of Cosmopoetry") and a "Manifesto" ("cosmopoetry means re-creation of poetry by using elements from outer space, and astropoetry represents its topnotch part - the fusion between <queen of sciences> and <queen of arts>") for the start of this festival initially opened to all kinds of cosmic poetry, but becoming specialized in astronomical poetry (astropoetry) adorned by astronomical photos and arts even since its first edition.
   As today I celebrate 45 years of life and 10 years since I published that English anthology very important for the birth of SARM's Cosmopoetry Festival, I propose the selection below from my 1995 book.
~Andrei Dorian Gheorghe, 2005, May 14th~

STARRY MEADOW

Infinity-
meadow
for the thought's experiments.

Only the body
censured
by the gravity laws!

HAIKU

Strings of light
attach stars to each other
so the Universe doesn't break

ITEMS

The physical item of infinity: Space.
The logical item: Time.
Abyss harnessed
by a gambolling dream.

COMPUTERS

Sophisticated computers proved
that life cannot bread in the Universe.
But even without their accept,
life is crawling in matter's caves
and creates
ungrateful computers.

PROCESS

Creatures-
cards clipped by stars,
striving in
an automated processing system
of energy...

METAPHYSICS

Somebody set fire
on me

"You are born"-
I heard a Voice

Somebody is threading
on my flames

"You are alive"-

I hear a Voice

THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Space is hunchbacked
and Time, oh,
in gland excess!

FORBIDDEN LOVE

The star I fell in love with
has sent a light passage
to climb.
The whole way I hoped
in fact she's a maiden
but up there
I realized that
she couldn't be more
than an incandescence.

I knelt in front of her
hiding my arms.

Then everything
started to roll.

For a while I heard
only the crazy laughter
of the shadows
incited by our
forbidden love.

THE RELATIVITY PRINCIPLES

The ether is still a dream

The genius of the Universe
remains in any conditions
unruffled

The variation of the genius energy
is the multiplication result
between its mass modification
and the square
of the speed of thought

THE NO TIME PLANET

On the planet Goleda,
the inhabitants were beating the air
with big rackets.

"We are playing with the Unseen,"
they explained,
"we return time to Him."
"Tennis," I mumbled,
"balls are seconds!"

"Set-ball!"- somebody laughed,
showing his round
teeth.

HAIKU

supernova-
temperature in glory,
void in decline...

PULSARS

Pulsars-
indiscreet variations
of space's erosion

A few drops of light
outrun
the allowed sentence

HAIKU

black hole-
darkish spasm
in eternity's tiredness

RADICAL

If we extract the square root
from a dream,
all that remains is
a touch of the Universe.

VECTORS

I named them "the vectors"
because they had
a long and pointed nose.
But everything was like this
on the planet Wron:
stones, clouds, wind,
even the water waves
had an arrow appearance.

I was stepping like an error,
careful not to scratch myself.

"If you are interested,"
the Wronians said,
"we teach lessons
of classical mechanics."

THE GREAT PULSE

The cosmic expansion-
a bell which announces
the thoughts' escape

The cosmic contraction
will find us
with stretched souls

GRAPH

Peaks as stars,
Edges as beams,
Graph as constellation...

(The nights in the Universe
are the same,
through shadows bursting out
their connection!)

THE GIANT

He was walking in a hurry
through the Universe,
outrunning by far the speed of light.
Even if he stepped carefully,
he always stumbled
over a star or a planet.
The comets collided with him also,
bothering the unhappy Giant.

He was crossing
the same infinite
hoping to find something special,
but everywhere he met
stereotyped fragments of sky.

"What agglomeration!
You cannot even strain!"-
he sighed long afterwards,
suffocated by stars.

And the Universe seemed to him
a sad apartment.

MEDITATION

The molecules of the Universe
are attached by love
creating the feeling of eternity

Inside them
and outside them
Somebody knows everything
Somebody smiles skeptically

NEVER-ENDING FOREST

In fact, the infinite is a forest.
Every branch has its own rules.
Every leaf is hanged by a destiny.
Time- insolent tourist- scratches its name
in the bark of the trees.

"Timbeeer!"

Somewhere like a supposed pain
I'm hardly working-
lonely space cutter.

-Andrei Dorian Gheorghe, astropoems composed in 1980s.-