Return
–Mateja Matevski
You’re coming to me and I sing
of your non-returnFrom azure heights
from deep shadows
with years
with sufferingWhy are you hastening
with your dying
through slow livingThe earth has long absorbed
my song
my cursesDeaf time is not awakened
even by love’s howlingThe heart has forgotten you
only the wrinkles on my face
remember you
Parting
–Gane Todorovski
you’re leaving and not looking back
the age-old fear of turning into stone
now germinates in you like pain
that something passes and you’re left aloneyou’re leaving and you carry much
in that mute threat of yours
without a note, forgiveness, or farewell
cold marble, dry-eyed, no remorse.You’re leaving hurriedly and without voice
and flapping like a startled bird:
you disappear beyond return and soon
become a shadow, neither seen nor heard.
Fatal misunderstanding
–Vlada UroševićThis is some film.
This must be some film,
otherwise how could there be
so many red-headed women,
so many beautiful landscapes
and so much killing?
But what am I looking for inside
and how have I turned
into a person
who is being chased
and who
in the end
must
die?
Futility
–Ante Popovski
Words are not life, and therefore they are eternal.
Surely there must have been a serious reason
Why among all the languages of the world
Only the Gypsy language
Has no word for “to have”.
I make a note of that. But this is futile.
You can’t write on your soul using a pen.
Escape
–Miloš Lindro
Let’s get into the words,
into foreign words
because we don’t have our own,
because even ownership
is just a word,
a word remote and mute
which cannot either have
or possess itself,
the word the cheeky appearance
which reaches out to cubic words,
some of them deaf and faceless
but pleasant enough to look at
with a clear conscience beyond the threat
before which one retreats;
maybe safety represents us
but escape is necessary
until ability becomes
one terrifying occupation:
the cause will be lost,
the objective will rock,
but the ability will remain
unstoppable to the end.
Menace
–Katica Kulavkova
Understand me
I can no longer
create you
heal you
with postage stamps
you shall no longer
roam about
I wish
to believethe moths
are eating
the addresses
within me
Intimately
some icebergs
are melting
and bitterly
the shadow
of timeis falling
when vines
and urges
are pruned
but the plant
flourishes
luxuriantly
like sin
Undesirable
–Sande Stojčevski
I was ready to sail off
on a large chunk of air
to become a permanent resident
of cheerful oakwoods,
how and again to swing
above the world
like an unborn year,
to be the wind,
transgressing the line
and crumpling the carbon paper.But too many undesirables
have I chosen for enemies.
Psalm 2
–Ante Popovski
studying medical sciences I am
excited by the fact
that man has in his bloodexactly the amount of iron
that would be needed
to forge sufficient nailsfor one crucifixion. I wonder:
who will unravel Sanskrit
while we are journeying to the stars?Each one of us, I think, is some future Christ
because with his own blood he can sign
his disappearance.
Photo 2013 Bernard Spragg NZ
I posted the poem “Futility” from Macedonian Ante Popovski before. It springs to mind now because I was thinking about pens. But, as Popovski notes, “you cannot write on your soul with a pen…”
While I could not immediately conjure up another poem specifically referencing a pen/pens, I could, of course, count on Adam Zagajewski to supply one filled with “small objects” and citing “illegible script”. We can imagine the pen and its ink, intimate, singular and aged.
Small Objects
-Adam Zagajewski
My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don’t desire light.