KUJTIM HAJDARI

 

The Mother Who Fed The Birds

 

With the evening weighing on your gaze,

with crouched steps treading toils and fatigue,

dusk gently caresses your heavy walking,

with care, it don't like to hurt your memories.

 

The many birds in the trees are silent for a while,

when they hear the stick ticking the darkness,

already know, therefore they see at the cobblestones,

they don't want to lose this ritual at all.

 

You walk silently and no longer caress them,

they follow you, look at you with pain and wonder,

sometimes with their beaks make any sound,

this hurts you and they don't want to bother you,

 

You used to gather them together in town square,

and corn, and wheat you used to threw from the apron,

they sang songs about you in the middle of square,

and wrote down your name on every street and stone.

 

Old age, suffering have you taken away all possibilities,

And longing for children so long without seeing them,

the birds don't know your sorrows and bitterness,

they think that maybe they accidentally wounded you.

 

While you come out late when the birds go to sleep,

you don't want they to gather and you don't give them anything,

it hurt to you like children when are in the middle of them,

when come around you and pray with their eyes and voice.

 

Our Youth

 

How many times I have cried my youth,

with the handkerchief of my heart,

I wiped away your tears,

at dusk of west when I was following you

with wounds of the body.

That bitter road,

without horizon, years of no return,

drowned out by communist slogans,

in the greed and lusts of a savage, selfish politics.

 

Lips burned for a little freedom,

the terrorized language hid in the abysses of fear,

with the teeth of pain

we chewed the legends of the time,

in Enver's prisons we wrote Dante's Hell,

with letters of blood dripping from a broken heart.

With eyes eager for light,

we measured the inaccessible spaces

 of the heavens of knowledge,

and we nurtured hope in the fountain of dreams,

Thirsty like never before.

 

I still cry with hot tears,

the rags left on the roads, on the forests of Greece,

tired from fatigue, turned from savagery.

your rags, which the wind still shakes

on the masts of the ship,

Your rags, which appear and disappear

through the waves

of black water of sea,

those who enter make rhymes

 in songs and in exile cries.

 

The world again in the smoke of time,

legend knit for us.

for us who sought the ways of the world for a cent,

in the pierced pockets of mercy.

For us who left like from cholera

from the place of the cradle that rocked us.

In dreams barbarically violated by an illusory regime,

in the lost dreams of the horizons of a false democracy,

Remained our wounded, burned, horrible youth.

 

Don't Break My Dreams!

 

Don't trample on my dead dreams,

where they are in endless ruins and mists,

where the hand of the trembling heart,

as a good mother, it cradles them.

 

In quietness when they cry silently,

for the painful love that is gone,

for what we have buried somewhere,

you leave the wounds; the time heal them.

 

Let our dreams rest in peace,

in beds of pain where they are lay down,

let's put them roses on their heads,

for them to remember - spring comes again.

 

When longing take and tears burn them,

they will wash them in the grass with dew,

when the sun will come out on their wounds,

it remind them that the world doesn't die.

 

I Get Sun From You

 

Caress me with bright sweet and wise eyes,

When you stand before me fragile and thin,

I am very fond of your look, your smiles,

Your cheeks - red apples that tell me something.

 

And why I am similar to uphill roads,

And why am I like a rock beaten by the sea,

Your glances do me to shake as an earthquake,

The beauties of life they open and reveal to me.

 

I am really hard at the look and feels,

But you break me, how a wave that dies in the sand,

How the earth is renewed from the shines of dawn,

I get sun from you and I shine all over, all the world.

 

KUJTIM HAJDARI

 

KUJTIM HAJDARI was born in Hajdaraj on April 10, 1956 in the city of Lushnja in Albania. He completed his university studies in Albanian language and literature in Albania. He worked as a literature teacher in high school. He has been in exile in Italy for years and since 2010 he has also become an Italian citizen. Now live in USA. He has written many volumes of poetry in Albanian and the last in Italian and English. He has participated in many international competitions where he has had several appreciations and awards as: The CUP of the special prize of the "GOLDEN PAGES OF ITALIAN POETRY" 2018. FIRST PRIZE for the diaspora of the Poetry Festival in Albania, 2019. The CUP of prize of the magazine "World poets and their poetry" in Romenia, 2020. FINALIST in 7 places in "Europian Poetry Championship” 2020, etc. Up to now, with his poems he is part of 42 national and international anthologies. His poems have been published in many newspapers in his country and abroad.