Poems by Zoran Anchevski 

FLOOD
 
Sky and earth joined with such lust
that the fish lay their eggs in the clouds.
The house roofs beat like war drums before
a decisive battle against crumbs of daylight. 
 
The sun folded its flames and left to work
in foreign climates with dry hearths.
Mud comes to dinner as a river nymph,
the night’s senses strain and faint with awe.
 
The roads turn into liquid mirrors,
the steps leave no footprints on them,
washed in their memory of small joys,
they found remedy for distances.
 
The river devours all past and present.
Sated and disgruntled, it murmurs dark vowels
that muffle the screaming bugles of the flood.
Vigil puzzles the sight, there’s no path to take.
 
Days follow like water-skins filled with cries,
then come weeks devoted to silence and hurt.
We forget the sonorous names of days
and remember only the dull words of migration.
 
Flood. After circumnavigating the world,
it enters the soul and there lays its roe of drought.
And then the messenger-pigeon arrives,
from the rainbow’s heart, singing in a new language.
 
Translated from Macedonian by the author
 
HEAT
 
What’s the use of all the sun’s gold
now that it melts into blazing lava
and singes your sweating forehead?
 
You wander about the city in high noon.
The streets and buildings radiate more heat
than the sun in a poor harvester’s hut.
 
No doubt, we all have a pining dream
of a northern land with glaciers and ice cream,
which we can’t enter awake.
 
Gulping for air, you think you’ll grow gills,
the dull cicadas’ song hurts you whole,
broken by blight, you’ll soon turn to ashes.
 
You run away and urge your steps to climb
the breath wind like a spider on a wall
and turn the page of the year’s calendar.
 
The horse of hunger gallops across the fields
stricken by yellow pestilence,
the udders meant for the unborn are dry wells.
 
Flocks of hungry prayers gather in the air
and pirouette like moving illusions –
you take them for sacks sagging with rain
 
from which joy’s moist breath will pour
and finally assemble the broken shadows
on earth’s wrinkled, blistering palms.
 
 
Translated from Macedonian by the author
 

Zoran Anchevski (1954) – poet, translator and essayist. Author of ten books of poetry. Selections from his poetry have been translated into more than twenty languages and published in various national and international magazines and anthologies. He worked as a professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Blazhe Koneski Faculty of Philology, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He has translated and edited several poetry and short story anthologies in English, including works by many major British, American and Macedonian poets and prose writers translated into Macedonian or English. He has received the most important awards for poetry and translation in Macedonia. He served as a president of the Board of Struga Poetry Evenings Festival. Zoran Anchevski is a member of the Macedonian Writers’ Association and is currently the president of the Macedonian PEN Centre.

​​

---

---