Luljeta Lleshanaku - 2 Poems

Marked

My deskmate in elementary school

had blue nails, blue lips, and a big irreparable hole in his heart.

He was marked by death. He was invisible.

He used to sit on a stone

guarding our coats

as we played in the playground, that alchemy of sweat and dust.

The one marked to be king

is cold, ready for a free fall

born prematurely from a sad womb.

And the redheaded woman waiting for her drunk husband to return

will go on waiting for one hundred years.

It isn’t the alcohol; she is marked by ‘waiting.’

And he only as guilty as an onlooker

pushed indoors by rain.

What’s more, it isn’t the war

that took the life of the young boy

with melancholy eyes. He was marked as well, born to be on the recruiter’s

             list.

Melancholy is the standard arsenal of war.

And then there is one marked for survival

who will continue to eat his offspring like a polar bear

that never notices the warming climate.

All of them are as closed as theorems, their sky

a rental home

where hammering even a single nail of change is forbidden.

They are waiting for their next command, which they will ignore anyway

like the Argonauts who filled their ears with wax

and rowed on through the sirens’ path.

Old News

In the village nestled between two mountains

the news always arrives one month late,

cleansed in transit, glorified, mentioning only the dead who made

it to paradise,

and a coup d’état referred to as ‘God’s will’.

Spring kills solitude with solitude, imagination

the sap that shields you from your body. Chestnut trees

awaken, drunken men

lean their cold shoulders against a wall.

The girls here always marry outsiders and move away

leaving untouched statues of their fifteen-year-old

selves behind.

But the boys bring in wives

from distant villages,

wives who go into labor on heaps of grass and straw in a barn

and bear prophets.

Forgive me, I’d meant to say ‘only one will be a prophet’.

The others will spend their lives throwing stones

(that is part of the prophecy, too).

At noon on an autumn day like today

they will bolt out of school like a murder of crows stirred by the

smell of blood

and chase the postman’s skeleton of a car

as it disappears around a corner, leaving only dust.

Then they will steal wild pears from the ‘bitch’s yard’

and nobody will stop them. After all, she deserves it. She’s sleeping

with two men.

Between the pears in one boy’s schoolbag

lies a copy of Anna Karenina.

It will be skimmed over, impatiently, starting on the last page

cleansed and glorified, like old news.

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Albania, in 1968, and came of age during the Albanian Cultural Revolution. She was only 22 when the dictatorship collapsed, relaxing the brutal censorship of the previous several decades, and resulting in a flowering of contemporary Albanian culture.  These poems come from her latest collection "Haywire" which will be available in the UK from Bloodaxe Books from next September.