Poems by Nikola Madzirov 

USUAL SUMMER NIGHTFALL
 
1.
 
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.
 
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