Excerpt from a Poem

I knock on the door of the house!Silence, only a light breath,The loves had fallen asleepIn the lap of loneliness.Waiting for the rhythm of my footstepsComing from Albania.A longing that in the soul of the house,Was neither forgotten, nor cast away.

Nearby, only music!The waves of the deep sea,Leap over the cave,They look to me like a fustanella,That Marko Bocari turned into a flagAnd a terror for the Janissaries.

In the depths, quiet, quiet...A dream rocking slowly, over the waves...It is the beauty of the sea that has come out to meet me.

The moon, the stars,Stroll high up, far above the forests...Melting the candles of their bodies,Over the water of the thirsty springs...

The trees, a meadow,A sweet sigh is heard, a rustle,It brings a melody to my mind,And Chopin composing,On the piano of gilded nature...

Among the trees, my house is silent...Dissolved into a vineyard,The longing, like a drop of raki, does not cease...From the cradle of longing,It rushes down from the mountain,From the longing that for five months,Makes it silent, makes it suffer...But keeps the love in its soul...

Silence everywhere,The work desk is quiet,The pen collapsed on the page...Above it, thoughts like clouds.Silence wanders across the paper,Carrying a work upon its shoulders.

The heavy curtains,Weighed down by the song of the dust...Everything gloomy, as if dead,Thirsty for cleanliness and a human hand.

I slam the door,I speak to the loves, to the desires.The time has come to understand,That the music of my footsteps is coming, forgotten...Covered by oblivion,But never denied...

I turn back time,In the fields of paper,I search for the sown seed of the work!Afterwards,Reading through their pages,Descending into the depths of the year,I look, I read, without any effort at all,A poem that I had created.I take it in my hands,With a trembling soul...My child, whom I had left all alone and forgotten.The poem trembles,It moves its title, its beautiful eyelash,From which flows a drop of longing, drop by drop...It tells me:“Please, do not go away next time!Or take me with you, wherever you go...”Afterwards,All the furnishings woke up, the poems,The house filled with light...Though all the parts of its fragrant body,I know even by the touch of my hands, in the dark.I speak to them, they speak to me,They scold me for my long absence...I stay silent, caught in guilt,And then I promise,That even if I melt away,I will never remain far from them...

But here,I have two loves, that is why I suffer...One in the motherland,And one in a foreign land...But both of them,Even though they are different...Are for me, a swallow's nest...The more my age slips away,And the years sift the years—a sieve...I must migrate together with love,Like the swallow through the seasons,To the distant nest of exile too,But mostly to the parental nest of creation...There where the earth, the stones, the song,And when I die, they will rock me in dreams...And it always, always seems to me,That my paradise will never have a death...Now that the years are flowing by me,I understand this music more easily...

Monemvasia..Greece...18.9.2011.