By Luljeta Lleshanaku.

The Reason

God stiffened Pharaoh’s heart: he did not let them go.

The more he resisted, the more God’s power grew.

Then God left them alone again in the desert

to separate wheat from weeds among his people.

The cure for a dog’s bite is Pasteur’s vaccine,

nutrition imbalance – always the reason for wars.

New technology causes floods and earthquakes.

And nadir is the reason for love.

The “Big Wave” was Hokusai’s reason for hunger.

Blindness in another painter invented the hard brush.

The reason behind all sufferings is another suffering

between generations – the silver wheel of initiation.

The reason behind Colombo’s journey was not America,

nor India of gold, as he pretended.

The reason was tobacco in exchange for mirrors.

It didn’t matter if he realized this or not.

Once in November, the reason and I were the same thing,

we were one. I was Rome burning, while Nero played the fiddle.

Abandoned in myself. Happiness is not a reason.

And what comes after happiness anyway?

Now, when thinking of these, I am sitting next to a Sicilian guy

on the Alitalia flight 2389, from Rome to New York.

Perhaps there’s reason here too:

his bruised palms, his one-way ticket, and his garlic breath

keep me close to the earth and far from reasons

for a while.

Two By Two

He grew up in the town beside the water,

where people answer questions with another question.

A long summer split in two,

and on the river’s edges, leaves graying like sideburns.

On Sundays, four women wash clothes

slapping their men’s shirts on the river rocks.

Four other women do the same thing, surrounded by foam,

taking revenge against husbands who don’t exist.

Lost, by the side of the water, a confused child.

His name multiplies, his name has a shape

in the mother’s palms – rounded as if a crater around her mouth

when she calls him.

The hair-clippings in the yard, on a sunny day.

A huge pair of scissors in the father’s hand. No mirror.

He sits in a chair; his feet hanging down,

without touching the ground.

You are safe; the future can’t find you here

the way a dog can’t pick up

someone’s traces in the water.

The rest of his life

he will have a duplicate view of things:

two houses, two trees to eclipse the fence, two truths,

two women to fall in love with…

Who is the reflex of whom?

He’ll follow them with his Noah eyes,

as they enter and leave, two by two, like the animals do,

each time the boat strands in shallow water.

Last Journey Of Ramesses

Because of threatening water

they broke the statue of Ramesses into blocks

and moved it to a safe and dignified place

far from where it was created.

For some hours

his Egyptian nose

hung between sky and earth

drawing the attention of a derrick-man and a part-time porter.

His scepter hung there too, the scepter of a man who once said:

“I carried away those whom my sword had spared

as numerous captives pinioned like birds before my horses”.

In a few days

all his broken parts will reunite

and he will be the Great Ramesses again,

the star of morning and evening,

ambushed by the camera’s sanguine flashes

like knives in a sailors’ tavern.

But the intelligent eye

will see the geometric cuts between the blocks,

not the sculpture itself but the transportation marks,

asking: “How heavy was it? and, “How did they get it here?”

Like the folding lines in an over-used map

where mountains were flattened a long time ago,

roads and their conventional symbols have disappeared

and the names of cities coagulated.

Statue or statuette

the last confession doesn’t belong to him, but to the shoulders of others

to that blind map circulating in pieces

which shows our only landscape

and the speed with which we traverse it.

Flashback 3

Heart of November. Wind blows like a shuffling of eras.

Snow and my mother’s face

wait in the background

to test their philosophy

of inevitability.

Lights, like a line of ants, lead

to the dining room. I am the bride.

It’s the end of the ceremony. And as I prepare to sleep

others carefully remove twenty one pins from my head,

as many as the years I’ve lived.

I know almost nothing of life;

know only that in sharp turns

experience matters less than two burning lights in the chest.

I try to hide my happiness under white fuzz

like an orange, carefully peeled.

I have emerged cunningly from my genetic prophecy,

holding on tight to the belly of the ram

out of the Cyclops’ cave.

If I struggle to part the curtains a little

with two well-manicured fingers,

I will see two shadows moving in harmony on the asphalt

the musician and the cello after the concert:

man and the anti-prophecy.

Self-Portrait In Silica

My portrait hasn’t changed much,

my head still tilted a little as though asking for forgiveness.

Why forgiveness? Forgiveness for what?

Forgiveness for being in the wrong place at the right time,

or in the right place at the wrong time,

or both? Forgiveness for being present

when asked to be invisible?

“Do not bite the spoon when you eat, do not dream out loud,

when you burn – do not smoke, when you bathe – do not foam,

when you crumble – pick up your feathers together,

when the elastic breaks and the soul drops at your feet, keep walking,

do not look back, and trust me, life is easier

if you’re invisible.”

So I followed the road I was told to follow.

Glass. At first, I was the glass on elementary school windows, smudged with swears

made visible only by dust.

Then, a monocle – what one eye trusted, the other one questioned.

And I came late to writing… I was the thick glass

of a telescope

that drops stars on the palm of your hand.

The eye – the same tired one,

and the stars the same – millions of light years away.

Still, I’m not false news, I’ve only arrived too soon,

and distance is my only deception.

Perhaps another time, I won’t be invisible anymore,

the slippery boundary between two worlds.

I’ll have a voice, a color, I’ll be read even on rainy days

well aware that tilting my head timidly at the photographer

is only an alibi.

Narration In The Third Person

It begins

when you start searching for a darkness

that resembles you, as searching for rhyme at the end of a following line of verse,

for a little music, or the exchange of carbon dioxide

between flowers in the evening.

It – the feeling of turning forty.

And it’s only a matter of style

the way years pile on top of one another,

because no clashes are expected, or noise,

because the hardest blow has already been taken

the way statues take it, nose-first.

A woman approaching forty

is a shadow in search of its object,

a monologue in the third person;

a series of lessons, little notes in red ink underlined

on the right margin. Spaces between lines are like flesh, like the body –

brief waiting periods behind a dentist’s door

from where the stench of arsenic

comes and goes.

Experience…, experience…, experience…,

small zig-zags and the sense of accomplishment

with which the silkworm nibbles at mulberry leaves

starting at the tip.

She makes peace with everything: keeps her drawers tidy,

practices yoga,

training her soul as a runway

for takeoffs and landings.

… when you approach forty,

or better yet: if you approach forty,

because being forty is not often required,

it’s a choice

like choosing a bench at the park,

the one that faces away from the street

if we’re not waiting for someone.

A Couple Of Deep Breaths

The city has expanded. A single bus stop separates it from the cemetery –

a couple of deep breaths.

A widow waits there, seated on a bench. Clenched in her fist:

money for the ticket. The first six months she used a pass.

When she arrives home, she’ll rinse herself to her armpits with alcohol

although she has no cuts on her body.

When she gets off, she turns her head to memorize the license plate

as she’d memorize her roll number.

Her breasts and flowers droop their heads.

A soft rain falls – an apostrophe

that disrupts the lecture between two worlds.

In winter, no one comes at the station.

The bus driver waits there habitually, the engine on, half a cigarette

moist between his lips.

After a brief moment, the door shuts automatically, the springs pull back in place,

like the last words of a verdict.

It’s not clear who gave the first nod

the city to the cemetery, or the cemetery to the city. A tango duel

in which, while the arms push, thighs pull

like currents in neutral waters.

In A Nameless Place

Here, you don’t need to fill out any forms,

or lose patience while someone takes your fingerprints.

Foreigners can’t violate

a place that’s built of breaths;

even temple stones were hauled from afar, kilometers away perhaps,

to taste the geometry of shadows.

There are no locks here. What can be stolen

from the city-state of dead poets?

At the post office, boxes are removed only when wet

like bandages on scuffed eyebrows.

Cities without billboards, without pretty women

selling anti-cavity smiles. Here, there are only streets,

streets that aim toward the periphery, the boundaries of cognition –

for the dictatorship of a blade of grass.

I greet my neighbors. They don’t return the favor.

What’s the point of wishing well to someone

who lives and dies within a day, perhaps within an hour?

Here they are on my desk,

on the backs of books, their photos purposely taken,

the garden of Eden in the background,

stuck like receipts against clothes hanging at the dry-cleaner’s.

And finally, oddly enough, I don’t know how to name this place.

A nation without martyrs has no name.

Deserters, yes, branded, like Spartan deserters once were,

with half-shaved faces–

one, at once, with light and darkness.

Translated by Ani Gjika.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in 1968, in Albania. She has worked as a journalist, and lately as a television author and screenwriter. She is the author of six collections of poetry in her country. Some of her works are published in other countries, such as: Antipastorale in Italy (2006), Kinder der Natur in Austria (2010), and two other books published by New Directions in United States: Fresco (2002) and Child of nature (2010). She is the winner of national literary prize “Silver Pen 2000” in Albania and the international prize “Kristal Vilenice 2009” in Slovenia. She is also nominated for the Best Translated Book Award 20111 in USA and also nominated for the European poetry prize “The European Poet of Freedom, 2012”, in Poland.