GORDANA KARAKASHEVSKA

 

In The Land Of Water

 

Child, there is the river.

That dewy mirror in which the world is reflected.

 

Look!

Her water is glass framed in a silver frame.

 

The bridge is reflected in it

And new vegetation sprouted in the spring.

 

The sun doesn’t shine in vain

-looks at us.

The water gurgles noiselessly.

Nothing is safe from her onslaught.

The silver cloud is in our eye,

But he left, the river took him.

 

Under the bridge sleep the guardians of darkness.

Distant stimuli howl and frighten us.

But remember, flowers remember us

 

Above our heads time passes as like nothing happened.

 

In the run of the water

The river will burst like down

And you are a branch, a morning trunk.

 

It Smells Like Lavender

 

The restless wants out

Like an impatient child

Which nothing can keep in the children’s room.

Where? – I ask him. Among the branches?

The cold wind sways the green leaves up

And down, up and down, don’t you see?

And, I thought I’ll never ever be happy

And I try in vain to give meaning to life,

To give a name to art and new dreams to impotence.

 

By chance, in the cracks of my thoughts I find a memory

Who silently pulls me to you,

To where everything begins and ends

But the restless wants out

Like hot lava from the dormant volcano

Who dreamed for a long time.

The lava is boiling,

Becomes redder than reddest color.

Wants to pour out like an overflowing basket

Of ripe cherries

Outside smells like lavender.

 

My helplessness, my weakness,

My blindness, my femininity,

My abstraction, my imagination

Everything wants to tell you

With simplest terms,

With simply words because

Life is so complicated,

And it could have been a calm sea.

 

I walk in the cracks of the day

And I think to all yours female

About cold what you found between their marble hands

And gaps in the hearts

And stories

Which you fold in a whisper between their legs.

 

I walk and I think

To all my memories that fade

Like an old dress worn too long,

I’m walking, and around me is the smell of lavender.

The child climbs on the trees,

And lava flows from the volcano.

Redder than the reddest color

Flowing like a swift river.

 

The River Flows In Silence

 

I lay in the grass on the hill for a long time,

Now I know the language of the bees.

I have been preparing for this road for a long time,

Today I am an old man who knows all fairy tales.

At sunset,

My mother calls us for dinner,

Because in our home no one does not sit at the table alone.

As a child, I used to find napkins stuck in the bricks

And in them-dry pumpkin seeds

For the coming spring when everything will sing.

 

My mother is poetry.

Thеsе are the pictures of an innocent child

Which remembers the white sun

And leads come from who knows where.

From poems new poems were born,

They don’t want to be silent.

I forge my weapons from their heat

I go into the heart of the forest 

I tore a one leaf and the whole trembled,

froze.

Time is running out.

 Am I meant to be?

To have neither love nor a roof over my head?

 

River, hi!

You are on your way to your sea,

I am the tongue of the winds.

Beneath my chin the sun shines, it’s summer here

Do you know,

Thay sold on the markets the sea salt from my hear.

I find traces of yellow paint where a star has fallen.

At sunrise,

My mother wakes me up with a glass of fresh milk and warm bread,

While I’m eating, the crust crackles and bursts.

I am far from white-haired winter.

Oh, river that you flow in silence!

We will not die together

And in all the worlds we will continue to look for each other.

We are shadows and voices from the gods.

 

GORDANA KARAKASHEVSKA

GORDANA KARAKASHEVSKA was born in 1973. She is a poet, storyteller, essayist and translator from English and Italian. Her poems have been published in more than fifty world languages. She is a participant in numerous events and international poetry festivals. She has published the books of poems: A Broken Poet and Other Poems, House of Paper and the way of Water; the book of short stories: Signor Giordano and... and the novella Undressing. For OPA, she presents herself with 3 poems from the latest collection of poems The Way of Water, which came out in May 2023 with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of Macedonia.