Powerful tremors shake foundation and peak,
Heavy tears are shed by clouds from the skies,
The oak gathers its shoulders to bear the pain…
Branches and leaves toss in the howling storm,
Nests are shaken, wings and leaves alike,
The rivers run muddy and loud,
The meadows shrink, shivering with fever.
The birds migrate, they no longer wish to stay
In the land of the Eagle, where they weave their dreams,
From the cold, even their beaks have frozen today,
The pain bursts with force through wood and stone!
What has happened, that the mountains bow their heads,
This has never happened to us in history.
Why do the tall pines tear at their needle-beards,
With the sad music of the winds, an overture!
The shocking news arrives in this month of February,
In this month, which also has short days,
Which freezes you with snow and turns you to stone,
Which blocks the roads with frost, and breaks a beam.
When a beam breaks, it also closes a door to us,
A tower door, with a great name in the world,
Which was open, like a great cup of wine,
We drank it, grew drunk and felt warm!
Even the saints trembled, wherever they are,
Those saints, who never loved him,
But who let their beards grow after his verses,
Even when they were mocked and laughed at in his lines!’
He never believed in God nor in Christ,
He believed in the hands and mind of man, the human,
Starting from the time when the world had a tail,
Right up to modern times, man as a god!
He who mocked the cassocks, who mocked chairs and ministers,
He who turned the river of art into thousands of turbines,
Whom even the gypsies loved with all their baskets,
He who was a Prometheus, who carried lightning bolts!
He who sang sweet words to mother Albania,
Who rested his head lightly in her lap,
And stayed awake all night, until the sun dawned,
When she languished, or suffered in her health…
He who shook the minister’s chair with his word,
Broke it with his foot and threw it out the window.
He who sang so fragilely for the friend and the lover,
And for the fever that the pet sheep had!
He who kept his office door open for friends,
And I, small in my body and in age,
Stood as if frightened and with measured steps,
Thinking he would sift me through his sieve!
That he would toss and shake my fragile art,
In his sieve of experience, but also of quality,
I stood frightened, like a little bird in the beech grove,
That fears the wind, but fears the storm much more!
He had given orders, even to the secretary Kristinë,
That the door should always stay open like a book,
So artists could enter without hesitation, leave and stay,
Completely liberated, without fear, like birds with open wings!
He had laid out the carpet for people, simply,
Without heavy mosaics, brought all the way from Iran,
His verses were like flowers, in prose or in poetry,
Like those the homeland had in its meadows and fields…
He, the friend of everyone, of the cow, the milk and the doctor,
He, who visited and healed every soul with art and words,
He who read the pain in the ladies' chests,
He, who with sledgehammer poems, knocked down mountains with his fist…
Your Dritëro, mine, He, the idol of the chosen song,
He, who turned the grass, the love, our pain into verse,
Gathering words for us through beautiful meadows,
And gifting them to us every evening in palaces of poems…
And we, who perhaps from poverty had nothing to eat,
Took his verses and books, in oil lamps and light,
Kept his books under our heads, and ate his poems,
Filled the belly of our minds, and starved our poverty to death!
We, the children of Communism, yellowed by propaganda,
Like smoked fish, without hope, with desires, dreams,
With our souls and wings gathered, bound in shackles,
Held onto Prometheus verses, crying out from within…
You generations who came after us will never understand,
That a person in life, even in moments of pain and crisis,
I know, you will curse us as incompetent, you will push and hurt us,
But know this, a person lives by eating poetic verses!
This is how we lived, little meat, fruit, much injustice,
Little milk, few sweets and even more buttermilk,
To poverty we added our own understanding, and love,
And we turned the legend of pain into a fairy tale!
*
I never had Dritëro as a comrade, friend or brother,
I never took a photograph whenever I had him near,
Because for me he stood in the skies with the art he possesses,
I simply had him as an idol, who holds the world on his shoulders!
I never boasted among friends and comrades,
When he threw his signature on a paper, for a creative leave.
But I fought with soul and art through my own time,
To turn the leave into a veil, thrown by a bride!
Even now I do not step in front of the caravan to shout, to howl
That a friend and comrade has left me, who had no equal.
The pain of my soul I kill inside myself like a man,
Even though the tears flow, tearing and piercing my eyes!
I do not shout, for Dritëro had so many friends, comrades,
If you put them in a current they resemble a great river,
For if I boast of the friendship, the work is in vain,
Because throughout the world Dritëro made and had many, many!
In his cortege, I will be an un-grown child,
Who will follow in the remaining years, the art and the poetry,
Raising songs to Prometheus, but also watering,
His value and glory, and that of our ancestors...
Last night my Library had the strongest earthquake,
The books trembled with writers from the country, and foreign.
They joined together with hundreds and thousands of books and pages,
So the pyramid of art would not collapse or suffer...
I was there, I saw with my own eyes, they had shivered,
They had placed across their chests, a black ribbon each.
There were also friends and comrades persecuted over the years,
But they had taken off their hats and stood in silence...
They, just like me, have Dritëro as a guide,
That Dritëro who distributed knowledge and light in his life,
Whom through the centuries we will have as our knight and hero,
Who raised our nation above all the gods!
My hand trembles, when I remember his hand on a paper,
Throwing his signature for writers, artists and talents,
When after the signature came the books, making the signature a work,
Original, without pretense, and without the magnification of a lens...
That is why I like his signature on papers, and always liked it!
Continued
Pilo Zyba
North Greenwich...4/2/2017...London
