Svetlana Hristova-Jocic
Temptation
"Why has no one ever hated their own flesh?"
Says the apostle.
I do, I say to him.
I do!
I neither feed it
Nor warm it.
I, say to him.
Sweet apostle,
I protect it from exciting movements of the flesh,
when it attacks me with carnal temptations.
Behold, it has started to calligraphy my lips
To provoke loving thoughts.
Reluctantly I say this to you, sweet apostle,
loving thoughts!
(In which garden does the snake not enter?)
With Lighted Candle I Come Out of the Church
Blow it out, God!
Where else can my foot sink except into the Darkness?
Let me abide in the ground - a candle lighted for the living.
Let me not see where I shall be snuffed out.
Here is the candle, almighty God, bless it!
Even if snuffed out, let it shine there in its proper place!
With burning fingers I come out of the church...
God forbid they bum up!
From me, as from a tall candle lighted before the altar
lined with candles. They light them.
From lighted fingers wax droplets trickle...
God forbid they burn up!
With their fingers they need to take the candles home.
Gane Todorovski
An Epitaph
Here lies a man broken from too much health
Full only of days, celebrations and wealth,
He rests in a metre of peace with black soil as a wreath.
You who briefly pass this way
stop, turn, remember for a bit
from this marble-cold slab
that there is no greater hoax than life itself
A m e n!
Jovan Strezovski
Angel
When the monk was locked in his cell
he saw a butterfly on the wall
that before him passed its lonely life
When he nudged it with his finger
it took flight on its wings
as though awakened
as though returning from the distant past
and it flew through the window
But from time to time it returned like a bright ray
that connects the shining world without to the dark world within
And like an angel it lifted his spirit to go on
Petre M. Andreevski
Lachrymatory
A lachrymatory is a phial where European
noblewomen gathered children's tears
to make their faces more beautiful. Our mothers however, gathered their tears
so that they would have something to take to the graves.
I saw my husband off to war
I bought a bottle for tears
and invited the sun into my home.
And I told it to sit beside me:
so that we could look at each other,
lest my room be empty.
And to shine on me while I cried,
while I filled the bottle with tears,
lest, without them, I should feel ashamed:
have nothing to welcome my man with.
Oh, Sun, you that look everywhere,
tell, how many times
I have filled the bottle and emptied it,
how many times, tell,
I am still crying, gathering tears,
to have at least tears for his grave.
(Translated by Filip Konhenski)
The Teacher
Maybe even the Teacher
was not descended from godly heights...
Because then even the sky
had more stars and the sun was greater
more visible,
both days and nights,
it was visible
to paint letters for us
and with the letters - words.
And as he told us
all must bear
our image and our name,
so the light around Him
shall never grow dim.
Waiting
(The Resurrection of Christ)
Then no one knew into what time we entered:
the past had ceased,
the future-laid aside.
There were great fasts
when even the birds and the beasts
did not drink water.
And when the time was fulfilled,
He rose from the grave
and in the sky a star shone
allowing us to see
who is with Him and who is not.
And in that Godly light,
here, we still warm ourselves...
Vlada Uroshevich
Outliving
In the capitals of the Corinthian columns
Christians carved baptistries
building the reliefs with centaurs
into the church walls.
Then in those churches
nomads from Asia stabled their horses
during campaigns their soldiers
laid straw for sleeping under the walls with frescos
donkeys and oxen from Christ's birth
looked from the stable with wide-open eyes.
Then from their Turkish baths
we built art galleries
and placed museum vitrines
in the inns where
camels and camel drivers once slept.
Buildings usually last longer
than the ideas that engendered them.
The wind scatters human intentions
the stone thinks its own thoughts.
Mile Nedelkovski
The World
Everything is merely objects and phenomena on which we bestowed names
so that you can build a world willing to celebrate us,
Everything is merely nouns which we bestowed on objects and phenomena
(even against their will)
so that we could build a world we could rule.
Now it is possible, when we are exhausted, that its imperfection frightens us.
Mihail Rendzov
The Monk Gabriel on the Road to Ithaca
(Ecstasy)
Nerezi, April, the Year of the Lord, 1980
He clutched the exalted thought
Forsook fear and the rats
Descended the imaginary rungs
And readied his bare feet for the road.
He did not look back
Only nodded with his eyes towards the chestnut
And elated he set out on the road by the spring
The road towards Ithaca he took.
The poor monk,
In his pure state he forgot
That Ithaca is no more
That the barbarians passed long ago
(Agora forsaken)
That the fires of Alexander are extinguished
That the galleons are no more, nor roads either, for that matter.
What he heard by night
O, what he heard by night
The waves of Kavafis
Battered his heart
Now by the monastery
One aspen stands
Bent towards the sea
The monk - the darkness
He is alone
Forlorn
Forlorn
And
Prays
Jovan Pavlovski
Strictness of Living
This is only my view of the life of Methodius, the oldest son of the
nobleman Lev of Thessaloniki. In this life of his, and mine, at the
same time, almost everything is added, everything is removed, and
thus there is poor information about him.
And if somebody asks: Who gave you the right - to add, to remove? I
would answer: I myself!
And should he continue: Do you know what right you are talking
about? I would quote St. Paul: I am talking about my God-given right!
Each of His Lives
Each of his lives, more or less,
is started with the genuine feeling of dependence on others.
For him it is only an initial preparation for the future.
Full of warnings,
that never match his own excuses,
he wastes most of his life on mistakes:
he allows the dreams to lead him!
Everything that happens in marvelous shapes during dream-time
is nothing else but the passing
from one to another incorporeal anxiety.
He knows: it is, probably, the pure beginning of connecting
God's laws to human laws.
Dreams do, indeed, lead him.
That is why he is famished, completely helpless.
With so many mistakes in one and the same body,
at one and the same time,
it is difficult to be healthy more often!
Trajan Petrovski
After a Visit to Hagia Sophia
What should a good a real Christian do
on entering such a temple
asks the guide.
He should light a candle and cross himself
answers the guide faced with our silence.
There are no Christians, I say
They have long ago drowned in deep waters.
I hear myself, a common Christian
who suffers from Christians.
Who still has fingers to cross himself with?
In Istanbul, July 1993
Bogomil Djuzel
Doubting Thomas
After he appeared among us unexpectedly,
Jesus actually started to eat the fish
to prove he was resurrected in the flesh
(not only in the spirit)
while we, astounded, stared at him.
Then Peter also tasted of the same fish
(to see if it also was flesh, and not just spirit?)
and then, coaxed by Jesus,
all the other disciples tasted of it too
except for me, the Twin.
And then He said to me:
"Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands;
and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side:
and be not faithless, but believing."
And this is what I did (for I had to)
and so it remained written.
But my unexpected thought remained
and my unspoken cry hung in the air
-"Resurrect, Christ, also the fish thou hast eaten?"
and even this momentary prophecy –
might produce believers in You
and in Your corporeal resurrection
but the fishes will be gone.
They will have been eaten by the Christians.
Our Father...
1
Hard is your heart
you fortress in the air
you stone in a cloud
We offer you our souls on an ornate rug
for free
2
Buried for ages
maybe you were
a bunch of flowers, sacrificial meat
now you are a fossilized bone
Once we dug you up
you became air again
ozone fuel
3
Haven't we crushed your bones
for your brain marrow to nourish us?
Communion
according to Mircea Eliade
The foreigners who baptised us,
tore out the first page of the Gospel
to hide the truth
that He, the Savior, was one of us
To welcome him back again
at the head of all our dead
dress up in your finest garments
and wait by the set table
He will arrive in the morsels and sips
and if you do not feel him, he came and went
He, their Savior, but not ours, which means
that you are already theirs, foreign
and we, and ours, maybe we are already gone.
Eftim Kletnikov
Eve in Eden Again
Eden is a pupil, a well
a mirror in which the Soul
is naked like a ruby
and innocent in a transparent body.
God sits inside.
I ask him to move a bit,
to take a short walk,
but he loves that nakedness
he sticks to it like a resin
and does not move an inch
scared that something
might hurt the light
if he did.
Scared I might pluck
a fig leaf,
and let a small shadow fall
on the threshold and the gate
where the Sun comes out.
Lament of the Lovers
(Expulsion from Heaven)
Oranges and figs,
Chicks give milk,
and young waters gush forth all day,
our kiss
is full of whirlpools and fruit trees.
We are naked and alone
among constellations in this moment
in which all of Eden is sinking.
And the rocks are putting forth shoots and blooming like plants,
each atom is a rose bush.
An invisible hand is weaving
the colours of the noon's loom.
But your multiplied eye, God,
is in each flower,
in every dream glittering and watching us,
we have chills,
our heart fills
with darkness and ice
despite the effulgence of light
We do not know our mistakes.
The golden apple of our joy
is worm eaten,
and although we are innocent
shame clenches us like a vise.
We managed to pluck
only a fig leaf,
to take the Child in the kiss
and to rely on his unborn song,
while we leave Eden
through the dark crack of Serenity.
Presence
The covenant of love
binds us to God,
and it is a bridge
over which He comes to us
in the silence
huge and terribly beautiful.
We share with Him on the threshold
the bread of joy,
but each one of us
stands alone in the pain,
as in our own element of experience
proving
our presence in the world.
Lenche Miloshevska
The Message of the Icon-painters
By the strokes of the brushes, by the paint employed, even more so by the master's skill with one and the other, you can recognize us and distinguish us one from the other, the leaders of the iconists' guild and the whole clan. In any case you can decipher our names on the hems of the saints' garments, modestly inscribed. And when the heathen rises above the belfry and whitewash conceals our craft, when such times come, pray for yourselves, oh you, defilers of the scene in front of us! (Mihail and Eutychius)
From the Altar of Pagan Sacrifice
Naked they carried you out,
You did not shrink in the sun,
They sacrificed you innocent
White as alabaster.
The skies never thundered
And rain never poured.
Humbled and mocked
The pagans fled.
Appalled by their vile passion,
The altar and I remember you.
Generation Twenty-Thousand
We are only
generation twenty thousand
of the forbidden apple.
That sin everywhere follows God.
The moment a star ignites does vengeance commence?
Vera Chejkovska
Heavenly Loves
lota does not exist absolute and angelic, in transparent folds, like transparent beauty, n her form allows no empty stretch in the bodiless flow of time, like given and gifted naked geometry, like centimeters of abstract symmetry. lota comes in sweet doses of approved selfhood. like a body-space-time of her own.
(Translated by Zoran Anchevski)
The Year of Our Lord
Saint Clement inscribed an inspired Ego
upon the great phenomenal world
I see the hagiographies, bright-hot dots.
Under the vault of Ohrid's sky
history is coolness, like
an invisible oyster.
And from the displayed lamb's brain in the freezer
the supermarket knife
extracts the origin.
And when Clement opened the oyster, the pearls from him
were virtual skies above the empty square.
(Translated by Ewald Osers)
Pasko Kuzman
Petition to the Pantokrator
From the raised hand which is a meaning
In itself of the movement of seconds
From the soft look and the Emanation
The festive silence of a given moment
The merciful compassion for his own
Even from the inevitable trembling
From centuries long convictions
From various promises and the Afterlife
The endlessness of the cognitive path
From all kinds of Life Trees
(Consider the present madness
Our irony with a broken shell
The false standards of value
Your so called punishments
and false forgiveness)
From the painted kindness before
And the malice and the ill whispers behind
The pre-tailored ways of greeting
The sugary smiles of neighbours
The big words of peace
The bright future of sweet-talk
From the ingenuous blowers of words
into soap bubbles and balloons
Redeem us Redeem us
(From That Mantle)
That obscure mantle, more specifically a Vision
Invisible in the life substance lurking
In its own sulfuric acids tries
to paste to melt to equalise
everything into tombstones
with its sulfuric acids
That mantle approaches with muffled
laughter Opens up quietly opens up
Giving itself allure While the empty sleeves
like a shadow in the wind flap in threat
That mantle That inevitable companion
(From the Unknown Guest)
The unknown guest comes in and says Good day
I came to take you with me The unknown guest
knocks on the door Comes in and says Good evening
I came to feast with you The unknown guest
coughs Knocks on the door Comes in and says
Good morning Here I am again It's time to go And always thus
The unknown guest comes in and goes out Takes and
Leaves
(Unfinished)
Jordan Danilovski
Apocalypse
The language is Enoch's fire
As soon as your ashes are scattered
There's fear between the walls
Outside the Manuscripts you are the dust
Which is the secret of the cosmos
And the Cosmos is secret
I fell face down*
And all of my body
And all of my spirit
Are transformed..
* from Enoch's Book, dating from about 164 B.C. (En.LXXUl-14)
Messiah
You drag away shadows
Darkness that threatens me
And Wind
Which blows only from You
And in You ceases
You are mist
Scattered whispers
Where flows
Dead water that erodes
Capability within me
I inhale you
And from you inhaled
I fill in empty faces
Movements foreshadowed
From which I want to know
Not what I move
But what I set in motion
What do you hide from me
In that motion
Thirsting amid the waters
When I look for myself
And how
Shall I understand
My own arrival
As mine
Or the arrival of others
That I fill in
There is no
Fulfillment for me
The substance
That carries me
Or do You
Merciful Father
In my suffering
Amid this desert
Seek through me
Your own reason
Jordan
My name
Is a river running
Through excavations
A brick
An inscribed curse
Ba-ash
On one side
The shadow of the murdered
On the other
That of the murderer
Like Day and Night
Is my body
A dam that must give way
Before the power of the Name
In flood
A hundred and fifty days.
Ivan Dzheparoski
Barbarians Don't Welcome Just Anybody
"And what's going to happen to us now without the barbarians? They were a kind of solution for us."
K. Kavafis
"Our God is omnipotent,
and with burning arrows scorches
anyone who does not believe in him.
Our God rules
with odds and ends in the universe.
Therefore, we do not know about destiny,
we swim from shore to shore,
and bathe in divinity.
But we are not ungrateful!
We always offer sacrifices
whenever we make an oath
and any time God saves us."
That's how the barbarians spoke
to Prokop the Caesarian,
and he, skillful in writing,
was quick to put them,
although pagan, into the history
which he obligingly recorded
secretly pining for the glory
and the riches that accompany it.
And in the north, near the Baltic,
another self-proclaimed historian,
a humble biographer and guardian of the life
of a famous mind - Oton Bambershki
recorded another chronicle
involving barbarian customs.
"When God's humble missionary
St. Bernard arrived among the barbarians
burning with desire to convert them,
to exterminate their idols,
to dry up their rivers,
to strangle their fairies,
in all his rapture, believing
that his one
true God was with him,
he began to preach barefoot and
poorly clad as he was.
He declared that he was the servant
of the true God,
the creator of heaven and earth,
and that he alone had been sent by him
to save them from their sins.
But it was all to no avail -
the barbarians did not believe him.
They even began to mock him:
how could he, a poor, un-noteworthy,
naked, barefoot, pitiful man
be the messenger of a supreme God
renowned and full
of all riches."
Surely these learned notes
from the best of scribes
helped a lot later!
From them everyone
who knew how to read and think
could easily learn:
The barbarians have a sense of beauty,
they do not eagerly welcome
just any kind of creature.
We must fool them,
we must transform ourselves
we must put on
clothes made of woven gold,
we must talk less,
but, truly, all this
will again not be enough
because to the barbarians
we are not much of a solution!
Dragan Krushkarovski
A Prayer for Salvation
No one is like God
His eye as big as the sky
Gospodu pomolimsja*
For Health and Salvation
Let us light a candle for the word
Unspoken
At dawn we shall exit the dream
We shall find in the yard
A tassel of wheat larger
Than our hut
And we shall fill the soul
And the barn
*Let us pray to God
The Woodcarver
He carved
The sufferings of Christ
The tears of the Mother of God
The prayers of Mary Magdalene
And a wounded shadow
bloomed somewhere
Indeed the suffering of the wood
Was lessened
And he did not carve it.
Apolon Gilevski
Black Circle
Everybody finds himself
turning his head
as a sign of disapproval
If somebody changes his mind
and begins to affirm
it is already a cross.
Janko Ninov (Father David)
Oedipus Faith
A need for silence
Is loud as thorns
Help God
A bloody breeze
A tranquil soul
One I know
I am. Alone.
Starry I Believe in you
while waiting -
the waiting does not fade
but evident is
Your Love for me
Be merciful, Jesus Christ
since... I... too...
Believe
From Orpheus & Jesus – An Overview of Biblical Motifs in Contemporary Poetry selected by Ante Popovski
|