HAMDI MEÇA

HAMDI MEÇA

ARE YOU HUNGRY?

Are you hungry?

Rely on your deathless soul, on it rely strongly

For only the man’s point of gravity is his own soul

The allegorical lever Archimedes mentioned, the whole human body

Pull off your inside garments, tear them off

Do not regret, stretch your arms around the cosmos and grab it with your hands

Do not fear its curls bigger than the earth

Recollect wooden spoons stirring ‘tenth’ desert ingredients over the fire, bear them in mind

If not spoons, remember distaffs spinning sewing threads

As well as thoughtful heads weaving lasting ideas

Spread your arms and stretch out your hands and catch at

Galaxy high geyser walls, hang there without falling

Remember your childhood when you would clamber on wild rocks

Now I am thinking of Michelangelo

The art hermit with his feet and his hands clinging to his paintbrush

His hair as white as the desert in Vatican’s Sistine Chapel

The genius reminds me even of the tear drop – o men, the exhausted

And suffering humpback never flees my mind

O breaths, so, so and only so

You suddenly find yourself among cosmic fountains of ice

Attracting your hands, catch as many particles from them as you can

Almost like my little grandson Erl does

When he visits the fountain in the heart of Tirana

(I myself chose and gave him the tree-lettered name)

So, so and only so, stretch your fingers, extend the willow leaves

Of human flesh cells to those arches and shapes

Look out! The whole cosmos is carpeted with smashed glass of broken bottles

This and ‘humans who changed into weapons’ have their throats shooting shells

That male will cut his veins with glass pieces coming from there

If the woman of his life is conceived with ‘lab-built sperm’

For the proverb ‘It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep’

Has become an unprecedented demagogic and populist rogue

Be attentive! Be more attentive than Ulysses was

While returning to Ithaca

Do what I told you to do

Rely on your never-dying soul, on it rely strongly

The globe of earth, one of the shapes breathing under the there rays

Catch and hold it tight, but before remember the baby

Sucking milk from the breast

Put the globe of earth in your palm

Do not let the heavenly burning candle slip off your hand

Resemblance comes from this – the palm looks like the plate

The boll of earth looks like the soft-boiled egg in the middle of the plate

Enticed by this, for the sake of vanity or pleasure, anyone may guess to answer the questions

What is the solar system? What is the rotation of a planet?

Hide the globe under your inside garments, I told you to tear them off

If anyone righteously regrets for the inside garments of his moral

Let him tear off the cloth of his skin

Tuck the globe inside the torn garments – there is certainly room for it in them

Wrap it well and tighten the ribbons of the torn garments firmly

Without the help of the teeth in your mouth

Nowadays the teeth and the rocks are easily pulled out

Planted worms keep gnawing their roots. Yes, yes, they do. Are you homesick?

Drive homesickness away with the hair of the women who comb themselves at home

Do what I told you to do

Tighten the globe with the ribbons of the torn garments, wrap the whole of it

Hold it tightly, the round-shaped and the female can hardly settle in one place

Then put the head of the ‘knotted globe’

Into your stomach hole under your ribs

The image of the swallow’s nest is nothing else but age

The image of the roe’s valley is nothing but an illusion

The image of the shrimp is nothing else but lust

Tie the ribbons wrapping the globe around your body. Tie them, tie them tightly

O man, your hunger will leave you forever

For the earthly sphere gives one hundred percent

Of its metamorphosic or lithoidal self unconditionally and for free.

The Album Containing Photos Taken in Calendar Time

Endure, just endure, what is endurance

But the skin of shape, unpeeled, unscratched

Unpicked, uncut, imperforated, unblemished

Unburned, unrotten, undecomposed

What was wrong with the extraordinary beneath the skin of endurance?

It has softened, it is liquefying

All the hidden eyes have emerged to the surface

Here are white eyes, black eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes

Fallen eyes, clear eyes, dry eyes, wise eyes, blind eyes

Crazy eyes, burnt eyes, pulled eyes, eyes of all kinds

What was wrong with the extraordinary of this ancient birthplace today?

No one knows what jaws, whose water is saliva, are chewing, grinding

The rocks of the famous historical touristic castle

The walls, the bastions, the towers, the churches, the ‘churches that changed into mosques’

The ‘belfries that changed into minarets,’ the buried trophies, the antiques

The old ones that have not yet become antiques

They have melted the three-foot bridge of the time, a cripple moving before your eyes

Behind your eyes, beside your eyes, over your eyes, below your eyes

This is neither the volcano nor the beginning of the apocalypse

But the cooking of a meal, mostly an oriental soup

‘Why?’ Questions, pieces of food stuck in between the teeth

Soon the eyes brim

With this pottage as pasty as old men’s eyes

The disbelievers and the politically disillusioned are the first ones

To eat it hastily

They also devour the portions of the passers-by who failed to satiate themselves in the past

The present is busy distributing countless mouths

As if they were humanitarian aid

The future of the sealed consciousness fills its boiler right up to the brim

After eating greedily, snorting and letting out onomatopoeic sounds

The ‘photo reporting moment’

Turns the camera flash on, ‘a collision of clouds’

In the picture each eater

Has two ‘hands made into spoons’

Hanging

Down

On both sides

THE TROUGH

I am talking about the bay’s trough

Where your mother or grandmother bathed you

You grew up

They grew small

Then the tough became the roof of your house

Then, later on, much later on

The tough became the lid of your coffin

THE ANTI-BIOLOGY

Time – drinking water gushing and walking

This liquid light of paradise flowing

Into the roots of every cell of her female body

Filled with erotic images of dawns, clouds, seas, mountains, forests

Always absorbent, forever thirsty

Neither rivers nor seas have enough water

To satisfy the need of a girl’s or a woman’s nature

As the evening dishevels its hair of shadows

To quench his thirst

The thorny ogre of raping and anti-biology

Thrusts its muzzle

Into the water source – time in the fertile body

Where the sun rises and the moon sets and the seasons change –

Licking and devouring red and white juice cells

That people call blood or anxiety

The monster hurriedly sucks drinking water – time in those droplet-like seeds

That people call cells or sighs

Until her body dried and only dried

And thus, dried, empted of the last drop of water

Empted of all the juice from the Heavens’ Rivers

It simply crumbled

Ending up in billions of blind light grains

And again the world’s deserts grew larger, took other steps forward

Hey, Bedouin, hermit, where are you imploring?

The oasis is but saliva on your face

HAMDI MEÇA

HAMDI MEÇA is an Albanian poet, prose writer, and essayist of academic nature in creativity. His poems continue to be translated and published in various countries of the world. In June of 2018, the International Publishing House “Aquillrelle”, Croatia, launched the publication of his complete literary work in English and Albanian with the first volume A Poetic Mountain Range (Vargmal Poetik), and the second volume 303 Mad Battles (303 Beteja të Çmendura). Meanwhile, the third volume is entitled Lines (Viza).