Translations Are Below Poems
Dementia (6)
Trumpeting tiger lilies stain
their legacy with lemony breath.
Lawn mower makes the air vibrate.
A fly traversing a knee, pulsing ink blots
beneath eyelids…
Where are the horses
that once grazed here?
When a cloud passes,
the manes of horses that once
grazed here meld into earth,
their hooves trample sky.
Numbers scatter among the weeds,
a jet spikes overhead. The war is over
but it rages on. In my hearts
it rages. You hold
a hushed tiger lily.
That roars its madness into honey.
Psalm. Hammer. Water.
Play with me, pleads my daughter.
Her little hand fits into mine
like a plug into a socket.
She lines dolls up on the roof
of a dollhouse and knocks them
to the ground one by one.
As always, I play the father—
little, smiling man.
I stand him up. I play again.
by Luljeta Lleshanaku
I always promise to come see you
but I never keep my promises
when they have anything to do with you,
when you are just a name
on my list of things to do,
always something more pressing,
because you will always wait…
There’s always a winter not far behind…
How difficult it must have been for you,
without a glass of warm tea in the evening,
tortured between cold walls
like quicksilver in mortar
now used to fill teeth.
There’s always an early summer…
with the sound of your neighbor and his son
who always come home quarrelling,
at the strike of midnight,
while you hold a photo of a girl, cut out of the newspaper,
the atrophied song of grasshoppers in the background
chirping away until noon the next day.
Sometimes when you were no longer here
I would draw a long line across
your name on my list,
beginning from the left, straight through to the right,
like the holy commandments written in the Koran,
no possibility
of turning back,
father.
Translated by Shpresa Qatipi & Henry Israeli
In the Absence of Water
by Luljeta Lleshanaku
It’s Sunday. On the soles of shoes
walking in the hallway
snow turns to plasma, and the memories of roads disappear.
A 150 watt lamp in the middle of the room
looks like a piece of yellow cheese caught in a trap of boredom.
My mother knits, quietly counting stitches—
she always knows how many are needed, even when swapping rows.
She is stuck to her seat like putty in the corner of a window,
becoming more and more clearly defined over the years.
She is a pin cushion.
She knows the art of submission instinctively,
and tries to teach it to me
and my sister.
Three Matrioshka dolls are we, lined up according to our sizes.
I am the last one,
the one that doesn’t fit.
Translated by Shpresa Qatipi & Henry Israeli
Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas
Dementia (6), Psalm. Hammer. Water. by Henry Israeli and A List of Things to Do and In the Absence of Water by Luljeta Lleshanaku, Translated by Shpresa Qatipi & Henry Israeli
