TRANSLATED FROM THE MACEDONIAN BY ZORAN ANCHEVSKI

Image Used For Representation

HESITATION

All suns
are red and rounded
before rising.
Just as all heads
of all matchsticks
before burning.

So I’m puzzled at times:
do I light the dawn
or just my cigarette?

COBWEB

I am a wind, wild.
I am a child.
At night when I dream of gravity
and weigh endlessly,
I want to see how the spider in my room
dies slowly,
trapped in its own cobweb.
I see how its useless movements
become slower
and can’t suppress my smile,
I am a wind, wild,
and see things like a child.
I see how my spider falls prey
to what it knitted,
and surrenders fully.
Like all the insects among its ropes,
it gives in finally
and falls in love with its cobweb.
It becomes gravity
and weighs endlessly,
it kills its own web,
it kills its own lace
and now knows it must eat
itself.

WHY WE DIE?

Well, that’s easy,
our blood is made of iron,
and the oxygen rusts the iron.
So we die:
With each new breath
our blood turns to rust.

FREEDOM IN YOU
(A communist love poem)

I know I’ll never start a revolution against you.
I’ll love your dictatorship.
I’ll not destroy,
but build your monument.
I’ll stop suffocating.
I’ll listen to you.
I’ll stop remembering,
I’ll stop being difficult,
I’ll stop being wrong.

You’re mere anarchy
and I’ll find my freedom in you.

I’ll let you use your weapons
if you promise
that never again
would there be peace
and my wound
would become food
and I’ll find my freedom in you.

In you
we’ll be alone,
finally pure,
the same forever

and I’ll find my freedom in you.

SLAVIC SORROW

At times it comes to me –
the whole of the Slavic sorrow.
It’s heavy,
full of hammers and sickles
and hits me hard in the head.
And I cry and am cold,
in a Slavic way,
and I kiss the ground
but can’t explain it,
no one can explain
how it comes
but it comes.
And when it does,
it pours entirely,
age-old,
immense
and nonsensical.
The whole Slavic sorrow,
made up of hardship,
of sun and tobacco,
made up by people
with wild, wrinkled faces
dressed in raw hides of sheep
and dead dogs.
It comes as a cross
and descends on my shoulders.
It comes,
and blinds me.

Also, read Neene and other poems by Abdoul Ali War published in the Antonym:

Neene and other poems— Abdoul Ali War

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