The smiles of our poets
What are our poets smiling at?
There’s nothing funny in our tribe.
Many lie murdered in gullies.
Our women and children are hungry and barefoot.
Unknown illnesses are mowing us down.
No new villages built and soon it will snow.
Despite all this, the smiles don’t fade from our poets’ faces.
As if facing sorrow brings them irrational, secret joy.
When we ask them what’s funny, they silently shrug,
And do the same when we demand they cheer us up in these dark times.
They guard the reason for their smiling just for their own enjoyment.
We trust them less and less, believe their sparse words less and less.
The smiles of our poets are truly mysterious in these poor times.
Did their minds burn out? Do they mock our common misery?
Their smiling sometimes cuts more cruelly than the weapons of our enemies.
But they are wrong if they think they will deceive us.
We will kill our poets only when we squeeze their secret out of them.
We will leave alive only the biggest blatherers, somber-faced and resembling us.
Code
O deaths deaths deaths,
You who are river stones stones stones.
Water of life,
Water of love,
Water who wears away away away
O river stones, stones, stones
You who are in me in me in me.
Without you I wouldn’t flow,
Without you I wouldn’t say
That I am not, that I am.
O river stones stones stones,
You who vanish into water water water.
O water of life,
O water of love,
Who vanishes among you.
A white shirt
I have a white shirt.
In the middle of the night
A dark body glows in it.
White is the border.
I live here.
I am spoken there.
I have a white,
Snowy,
Angelic shirt.
I raise the collar.
Unfasten a button.
Roll up a sleeve.
Language gets dirty.
The angel gets dirty.
The soul gets dirty.
But I still live
In my snowy clean,
In my perfectly white shirt.
OPOEne dish all dishes
Love is
A small kitten
Drinking water
From a cracked dish.
My mother
My mother
Who art in bodies,
Devastation is your name.
Come to me at least
In your exile,
Your brutality occurs
In poverty and plenty.
Toss today at least
A worthless crumb
And forgive me
My moments of weakness,
When I try to steal more from life
Than you intend.
Don’t lead me once more into emptiness,
May my bones be crushed
When you caress me,
Mother.
I DON'T KNOW
SEPARATED
by Nikola Madzirov
Recipe for Indifference
We saw them, hungry, and spoke
Uninterrupted about a healthy diet.
They weren’t our problem,
It’s just that we couldn’t bear to watch how
Day by day, hour by hour,
Their children were decaying like paper.
We spoke louder, no, they weren’t our problem,
We exchanged recipes for specialties,
Attended cooking classes and grumbled
About the high prices of tuna and truffles.
We knew some of the hungry by name
Or we knew someone whose relatives were starving,
Or we knew someone who knew someone
Who, despite our strong dietary standards,
Despite the fact that their distress didn’t concern us,
Allowed themselves to raise their voices, to protest,
Even to spit into the fat face of the world
And also demand food for those who,
Day by day, hour by hour,
Were becoming skeletons before our eyes
While we, wearily,
Because we knew its bitter aftertaste
And ultimately it wasn’t our affair,
Digested the number 43 or 128 or 17 or 99
Of those dead from hunger in the last 24 hours.
No, we were not allowed to ignore them,
Even though they weren’t our numbers,
We didn’t cause their distress, we didn’t add them up,
At most, the weight of unbearable scenes was forced on us,
So burdensome for undisturbed digestion
And the healthy appetite of all us peaceful and democratic people.
Why did we have to look at them?
None of us really knew.
Looking at them, we raised our voices even more,
Yelling at each other, increasingly deaf to what was being said,
What to call the latest culinary trends
And where are the best traditional dishes?
But we couldn’t stop looking at them.
We also saw them when we looked into our tureens,
When, our eyes half closed, we chewed roasted meat
Or when, eyes closed, we tasted the most delicate desserts.
They were increasingly alien and increasingly irritating to us,
Even though they’d never been our concern, at most a nuisance.
Their cooks cooked hunger,
Their mothers seasoned starvation,
Their fathers, empty-handed, brought death
From their shops, which were no longer there,
And their gardens, which were no longer there,
And their towns, which were no longer there,
They brought the number 56,000
Or the number 127,000 or the number 246,000.
Their hunger was being added up
In the large, luxurious gardens of the dead,
In the vast, spacious fields of the dead,
In the bursting, growing plantations of the dead,
Ours, however, in the checks at select restaurants.
Day by day, hour by hour
We ate and watched them and suffered greatly,
So that despite the tastelessness of what we saw
We managed to eat everything.
We wiped our mouths, paid, tipped double,
Shouted in the doorway We’ll come back tomorrow,
But be merciful, trust us with the recipe
For how to stay the way we’ve always been.
I DON'T KNOW
SEPARATED
by Nikola Madzirov
My little god
At birth
A little god
Hid inside me.
I change,
He is always
Only himself.
We don’t totally overlap.
I often call him,
He isn’t there.
Sometimes he reaches out of me
And strokes others’ gods
Without me noticing.
He isn’t bad, my little god,
Though misunderstood and alone.
I pity him.
I wouldn’t want to be in his skin.
But he is in mine,
Thus I am grateful to him.
I DON'T KNOW
SEPARATED
by Nikola Madzirov
The Sun Steps Behind Me
Today is every Monday.
Tonight we’ll be on our way again.
I love and say [or am?] the words
To the sun, which walks, which walks.
Today is every Monday,
Another corpse goes into the mud.
I am a seed.
The sun walks behind me.
More persistent than dust and weed,
Free to disappear into the unknown.
More and more quiet, more and more bold.
The sun walks behind me.
I love you by the light of the night.
I love because I’m an exile.
I love in complete darkness.
The sun walks behind me.
When grass awakes again
And the rivers whispers harmony,
When I, when we are gone,
The sun walks behind me.
Today is every Monday,
Tonight you’ll be on your way again.
Go through complete darkness
To the sun, which walks, which walks.
Above the sky, beneath the earth
Shall I fall into the gray sky,
Into the pale stroke in the gray,
Into the trace that, behind a feeling, reveals
That it does not exist, and thus will return.
Shall I fall, vanish into the in-between
Like a mouse in the night flour, sleepless?
And never awaken except in letters.
Shall I fall and fall and leave
Because I love returning, because I am
Above the sky, beneath the earth, forever.
Returning home
Every one of us
Is from somewhere,
Everyone is endlessly
Arriving
From somewhere.
We’ll never stop
Arriving, singing, being everyone.
Stars, rivers, mountains
Are unreliable orientation.
Only what you carry,
What you cannot stop
Carrying inside yourself
When you’re arriving and arriving
Endlessly,
It is only this,
Only this—
The only place.
Everything from somewhere,
Everyone, someplace.
You’ll be praised,
The undefinable and free
Course of our path.
Here comes the boy
Here comes the boy who plays
On a halogen light.
Because of the noise
Nothing can be seen.
In fetid cellars he leaves behind
Plasters and fish oil.
This is not a metaphysical era.
This is not an era for the voice.
This is the era of halogenic noise.
Unplug the herring from your ears.
Can you smell my fear?
The forecast sets
In a broken puddle.
Our era began
Like a toothache.
It will end with the hallucinations
Of microbes in the dark.
POEMS
by Aleš Šteger
The smiles of our poets
Code
A white shirt
OPOEne dish all dishes
My mother
Recipe for Indifference
My little god
The Sun Steps Behind Me
Above the sky, beneath the earth
Returning home
Here comes the boy