Sadik Bejko (Albania)

Sadik Bejko

(World Poetry Curated by Agron Shele)

Sadik Bejko is one of the most prominent poets of contemporary Albanian Literature. He was born in the village of Komar Tepelena in 1943. He was a lecturer in Albanian Literature and the History of Civilization. As a poet he has received national awards (Silver Pen, 1998) and other regional awards. His poems have been translated into English, Japanese, Greek, Romanian, Serbian-Croatian, Macedonian and Swedish.

 

 

1-      Cherries

 

Your lips, two red stony cherries

Tough, sweet, the red earthly

Squeezed and clotting into two red juicy cherries.

 

In my Homeland there’s the land of cherries

In those ancient trees

As to have been made of the saint Adam ribs

Into your lips the cherries of season

In your garden, into your body, so sweetie juice of yours

As to have been a waterfall falling endlessly from rocks

A sleeping harshly river

 

I will never know how beautifully is the blossoms of those cherries flowers

Deeply reddish those fruits under the Sun of season

Wandering of that innocent lured I do still love

Those cherries

Hanged into your lips

There where you are

In your land

Into my mind the cherries of the whole world are living amongst tough slopes

In distant valleys and mountains

Reddish and juicy

As today and the coming year

In eternity of years coming season after season

Red cherries of your trees of your body

Into your red lips

 

This night to forget you

I am drinking with my friends watching the finals

Of world football championship

 

And tomorrow?

Tomorrow the lightning cherries in your garden

Dewed with this reddish of the sun rising

Stucked n the eternal sky beyond the dreaming awaken

 

So through centuries from this love for cherries

We the men are made

From women lips

Into the red seed of embryonic child

In our blessed day

In the day of creation.

Your lips

Red cherries painted with the reddish of the stone and sunrising dwelling

 

 

2-      The damned hunger

The river’s monologue

 

I have had a damned hunger that eats stone’s morsels

A hunger- as grapes smut for my sane and youth.

 

Only for the tree breathing by watering lungs

 

My ribs got distorted pierced, got opening cracked.

Have you got hunger? – I was asked. Eat rocks with your mouth and ribs

Eat icy birds to get frozen underneath your blankets and bed.

 

None can predict the ending, so the river says.

 

With lips dried on stone, with frozen or thirsty cracking

So I was kept with softy tides shoulders every single day

Until lied with salty water a sea table raised.

 

Here by force we would smile to each other

We the rivers that grinded ices and rocks.

 

What should I do now? To beg your pardon that I closed my mouth

And I kept the smiling of hunger within the stones on my shoulders ?

 

 

3-      Two fingers wind

 

Eaten by the darkness, scoured

Within the joy of pains

That are rumoring his carving speleaning

 

Fallen into abyss opened wings

My heart, I kiss you wherever

You maybe kissed by many others

 

But, higher, two fingers higher in the wind

There were the axes are heard pruning the branches

Those soaring of mine above skies

 

Instead of falling to earth.

 

Between the evening and the ax

Only your soft honey kiss I dare

 

 Translated into English by Entela Kasi

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Setu, November 2023