Alisa Velaj (Albania)

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Alisa Velaj

Alisa Velaj (Albania)

Alisa Velaj was born in the southern port town of Vlora, Albania in 1982. She has been shortlisted for the annual international Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in UK in June 2014. Her works have appeared in more than eighty  print and online international magazines, including: FourW twentyfive Anthology (Australia), The Journal (UK), The Dallas Review (USA), The Linnet’s Wings (UK) The Seventh Quarry (UK), Envoi Magazine (UK) etc etc. Her poems will appear soon in “The Curlew Magazine” and “Poetry, Life & Time”. Velaj’s digital chapbook “The Wind Foundations” translated by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj is published by Zany Zygote Review (USA). Her poems are also translated in Hebrew, Swedish, Romanian, French and Portuguese. Alisa Velaj’s poetry book “With No Sweat At All” (trans by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj) will be published by Cervena Barva Press in 2019.

THAT PAINFUL EDGE OF LIGHT

An imaginary dialogue with Garcia Lorca

He had told me Granada Hills

Differ not a lot

From the hills of my birthplace

He had also told me

Winds have no homelands

‘Perfumes – flowers – knives’

You once wrote

And I knew not that such a melody

Sprinkles guitar sounds at evenings

Even light has no homeland

I had told you

Dawn is dawn on all shores

And none has ever angered

At flowers

Perfumes and serenades and oranges

Your endless Andalusia, my darling

So I know not which orange

Shelters that painful edge of light

Or you might have picked it up

And now you dislike telling me the truth.

TOGETHER WITH THE SUN

One day will come together with the sun

To put an end to your migration through foreign lands

With the help of seagulls

And of fish that used to shine our nights

We will find our words gone with winds

So the first dawn, the second dawn

And the third dawn will return again

And our voices – my light –

Will echo through the dawns of all the seas of the world

Deep voices

Once lonely

Of which the only prelude

Is a guitar chord.

THE CALL OF THE WOLVES

I have now come

With my peaceful soul and breath

Don’t expect to single out anything at first sight

Only on Sundays soul is a contemplating view

Breath stays hovering between me and the world

I shall stay a little longer, and then I shall leave

Otherwise the ripen apples will rot with gloom

I shall stay as long as needed, not a single moment more

Departure becomes meaningful when the sun’s winds blow

Arrival is blessed with a few rain drops

On a day as clear as the Ionian Sea waters

Don’t implore me at all to stay this Monday

The blue of the waters is the voice of my journeys

The blessed call of the depth of the skies

The only happiness empty of farewell sadness

I told him that I adore small-mindedness.

© Translated from Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj

Setu, August 2019