to the poet KOCI PETRITI

My penToday conducts the final concert.The columns of your balladsI set as notesAcross the taut strings of grief,And turned them into longing sounds…Your verses are many, poet.With your hive of honey-making,With wing-rustlings of desireYou gathered them from the flowering uplands,From the gardens of folk art…You drank water from their springs,And then in the raised combs of timeYou laid the honey and the fragrance of song…

I never thought of you lying down,With your hands crossed,Because you carried the cross on your back,And ran, a marathon runner,Towards the Jerusalem of the temple of poetry.I never thought of you silent,Because within the valley of the mouth that is silentI hear the murmur of riversTurned into ballads.They murmur the goodness of generations,The lullabies and the waving of the flag,The first stammering of every childWith wing-kisses of flight…You in the homeland, I in London…Between us a river, wide,Long and deep with longing…But over this river of distancesStands raised the bridge of the Besa,The Brooklyn Bridge, the Bridge of Drashovica,The bridges that join Continents, loves, dawns…

What is wrong with the sun this morning?Why are its rays hanging loose like hair,Its face dishevelled, without wings?Why does it wander crazedLike Ophelia along the banks of the Shakespearean tragedy?Time has lost its bearings,The East its age-old balance.

Poet!Release once moreThe flocks of your inspirationsInto the sky of my life, of our life,So that little mother Albania may kiss meWith lips dried by centuries of injustice.I want, as back then,To run after their wingbeatsIn the blue of thought.Then, with the rhythmic beatsOf the drum of time,To split death's blindness and the drum of its ear.To deafen and to blindOld Death, who opens woundsIn the fragile, flowering body of feeling,And in the beauty of the maiden of lyric poetry.

I do not know, but I longTo lead a great round dance,To draw behind me all the lovesOf your creations,That, dressed in costumes of poetic colours,They may fill with sound the great stage of heaven.May the angels take in their fragile wingsThe blue and the sounds of the harp, the vibrationsOf thought in the fantasy of creating your world.What shall I say to space?You were born in a land cut to piecesBy the knife of injustice,Forever conquered by the force of the mightiest.But with the strength of your soul you conquered the world,And more, its untouched expanses…

I hear a violin far off,The bow of this early century plays sad melodies.Sovjan, where you were born, is cold,The Shkumbin shuddered,Shrank its flow from grief,Like a mother in labour, curling up from the birth.There, among the mountains,In the deep valleys of Librazhd,That look like nests of legends,I hear wings beating on the slopes,Wings that climb on high.They rise above the ridgesAnd shade the fields sown long beforeBy the poet-farmers of their time.At the edge of every field,On the little knolls and hillocks,I hear playful laughterThat lets loose a flock of partridges, of hoopoes!

When we partedYou promised me you would wait for me.You told me:“TimeNeeds other hydropower stations of light,The time has comeWhen, over the dust of poetic centuries,We must write and orchestrate the final song.The ploughshare must be tempered,To work the fallow land, the fields, then be watered,So that from its depths other saplings may sprout.And may the seed sown on every sideConquer, rampant in battle,The bodies of young maidens,Who step onto the stage again,And give birth for the motherlandAgain to Teuta, to Buzuku, to Skanderbeg,Who on the body of the nation keep watch, and never sleep”!

The stadiums of reading are left empty,Blind time runs after bread,It has forgotten the sacrifices of the man with the rifle.The light of learning has been neglected,People run after food and after crime.The mill of thought runs empty,PeopleAre fed on the bran flour of propaganda,The weaving of the spider's web is worth more.The propellers of the mill's sails run empty,Its millstone grinds the pain and throws it in the sieve.Then, then the silage that is madeBecomes food for the pain that was created.The sky roars with thousands of beliefs and ideas,The truth stands naked, trembling,But no contemporary sees it.Hard times,Dense clouds wander through space,And with a din they flood the vineyards,Knock down the amber grapesAnd the must that waits beneath the leaves.The world trembles under the green palms of the leaves,From the pain and the injustices of fever…

You are silent, poet!Christianity will break its established laws.On your final road it will not cross your hands,Enough the time when decades and dictatorsCrucified your thoughts and flights.The poet's hand is a beakThat pecks the golden egg of dawns,To bring to life for generationsThe birth of birdsong…

You lying on the bed of eternity,I lying in the swing of your poems,Time, a mother's gentle hand, rocks me.The breeze come from the furnace of age-old thought,Sifted through the sieve of your talent,Caresses my face and hair,Grief, it seems, has its weight in okas…

Your swingA cradle,That since antiquity takes and givesLove woven from an oak, a pine or a poplar…

The verse and the arc of the swing have a mouth,It can carry and bringThe caravan of songs all the way to Troy…

I would see you,Always smiling,A tailor who all your lifeHave dressed the worldIn the suit of art, cut and sewn with taste,A hive of ballads of valour…

A fustanella with the “Gorare Dance”At the great table of Skanderbeg,That sways with heroic deeds risen from the earth.With the bun of Gjergj Elez Alia,Returned with seven wounds to an oak,On the great branch, up there at the top,Sefa the basket-weaver dances and leaps…You, collector of Karl Gega, of Babjeni,Who bores through a Semmering,And though one of your eyes is lifeless,Within the sky of its gazeBirds and dreams take to the clouds,The signatures of poems kill a helmet,When they lay the fragile stalk of grass upon the page…

You,Who take the Drin, the Shkumbin and the Valbona,And turn their waves and echo into verse…You release them in cataracts, their hair let down,So that the future, with combs in its hands,A bride dressed and standing as a bride,Makes them a dowry for the days to come,With rifle shots that greet a child's birth…You baptize them with the name of ancient Aeneas,There where history and language togetherRaise for the world the castles of foundation,Whence come culture, the colours and the dye,For the signature and legend that Troy created.Homer was not blind,But fratricide and treacheryMade him write tragedies;In the end, when he read the verses, they stuck in his throat,And forever his eyes were blinded…Since that timeThe hurricane of treachery has never ceased,Which drank milk at the breast of treason,And, its thirst growing, ravaged the land of Illyria.

You lying in bedIn the small room,The windows, their eyes closed,Do not want to let the bitter news out,Heavy, painful is the truth of the sacrifice.But can a hive stay closed?Your poetic bees are humming,They seek flights on wings,In search of pollen, of long journeys…The windows creak their bones,They kill the silence and the pain,The soul that wanders through the roomSeeks Jerusalem with an echo…

The visitors are not enough,Who come in and go out on foot.Time eats its pain with its teeth,Grinds itself,Long is the road to the moon…

***You told me, poet, that you would wait for me!You would water your vineyards,And plant other saplings.Time, the generations and IHave need of wine…Of worth, of mornings – rainbows in the ether…Time and the nation have need of oaks,Of strong wings and leaves;Eagles do not build their nests in brambles,But high, up where they greet the clouds.

It is believable, I knew it,When the storm begins and comes,The birds gather frightened under the trees,While death, wandering about,Cuts branches and the fragile leaves,Without asking about the blossoming, light-stepping fragrance.I knew that your going would be rare,Without asking about the years or whose turn it was.The scythe of the reaper death in the meadowCarries the pain of the great dictator too…When clouds wring out their hatred over the mountains,The rivers swell with water and grow turbid,They have no time to think,They take and flood the fields with grief,And the crops, sown and thriving…You were not afraid of this scythe, you stood up to it.But it could not have happened otherwise:A swallow's longing for flightMakes it search with its eyes upward,To touch the clouds with beak and wings.For you, who sang with the fragile voice of Trishti,Christ's resurrection itself came and took you…

To take the poet up to the clouds,It came down into his art itself,Together with the light of dawn,On the date of the resurrection of Christendom…And took with it this yearThe saint-poet for the rite…

The rushing river of lifeWill flow through seasons and banks,Through valleys and through paths,With roar, foam and echo;It will conduct our time for ever,Which you, poet, with inspiration and pen,Raised a nest for in the tree of eternity.Every year on the anniversary, at Easter,With my Christ, ours, the two of you together,You will plough and disinfect the treachery of the savage world,And plant the beautiful art of love, poems!

And the generations, waiting through the years,Watering the feeling of goodness,Will await your coming with their faces raised.There where time carries on its shouldersThe values of writing in the saddlebags of time,And through winters, wind, frost and slushBears them towards immortality…There where the poet, like Rozafa, left a breast,So that the lips of readers who come and goMay drink the song and the history…

But I, poet, what shall I plant for You?A small tree of friendship, which the two of usPlanted together through these years,I watered it with the pain of this day.From the planting of a vineyard, the fruit,From the growing up to the Cask,To the sweet wine of high degree,Which my Cask, filled with art,Keeps sealed, its taste and its worth,And now, I open its tap and its door…

The fragrance and the art conceived,Between friendship – a bridge unbroken,The union of essences with awareness,For a rare and beautiful taste,Let it flow through the gates of friendship…

“Time drunk on freedoms”May ravage the world like hordes,But it will be lost without loves,And without the blossoming the garden of poems gives…

Fare well, friend!Father and emperor of the greatest estate,Which down the centuries, like old wine,Grows in degree, quality and worth.And your song, in the Nation's eyes,Will remain a spring among the leaves, unlocked;The trees will conduct with branches and leaves,The birds with their chirping high in the clouds,Their lips and beaks dipped in wine and verse,Will sing on rooftops and on thresholdsThe rare birdsong kneaded in your kneading trough…

With the waving and the lahuta-song of a cloudThat the homeland sends today towards you,May the ruby drops of your poetry,On the age-old palm-leaves of humanity,Water the fruit of love and friendship;There, at your Rozafa, may they sit and drink from the breast!

London…25/4/2014