This is what summer nightfall is like: the adulteress comes onto the balcony in a silk nightgown that lets through the trembling of the stars, a twig drops from the beak of a bird that falls asleep before it has built its home, a soldier lowers the flag of the state with a letter from his mother in his pocket and atomic tests in the womb of the earth secretly revive the dead. At that moment someone quietly interprets Byzantine neumes, someone else falsifies the exoduses of the Balkan and the civil wars in the name of universal truths. In the factory yards the statues of participants in annulled revolutions sleep, on the symmetrical graves plastic flowers lose their colour and ordinary ones their shape, but this peace of the dead we have parted from is not ours.
2.
In the village with three lit windows a fortune-teller foresees only recoveries, and not illnesses. The waves throw up bottles enough to hold the whole sea, the arrow on the one-way road sign points to God, a fisherman rips off a bit of the sky as he casts his baited line into the river, some poor child searches for the Little Bear and the planet he’d like to come from, in front of the doorstep of the killer with an alibi a feather attempts to fly. This is what usual summer nightfall is like. The town combusts in the redness of the moon and the fire brigade ladders seem to lead to heaven, even then when everyone is climbing down them.
Translated from Macedonian by Peggy and Graham W. Reid
SILENCE
There is no silence in the world. Monks have created it to hear the horses every day and feathers falling from wings.
Translated from Macedonian by Peggy and Graham W. Reid
Note: Basic elements of Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation.
Nikola Madzirov (1973) – poet, essayist, translator. His poems have been translated into more than forty languages. For the book Relocated Stone, he received the Eastern-European Hubert Burda poetry Award and the Miladinov Brothers Award at the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival (2007). Other recognitions include the Studentski Zbor Award for the best poetry debut and the Xu Zhimo Silver Leaf Award for European poetry at King’s College, Cambridge, UK. He has been granted several international fellowships: International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa; DAAD in Berlin; Marguerite Yourcenar in France. He is one of the coordinators of the international poetry network Lyrikline.