tr Vlora Konushevci
The picture doesn’t lie, yet it seldom tells the entire tale,
Paul Auster wrote,
and according to his advice, whenever we have beautiful sights before us,
we smile and turn feelings into pictures.

The leaves this fall are a spectacle to behold.
Colourful background, golden landscapes, boats on the shore
and a couple kissing, madly in love.
Reminders of a summer gone by.

I wander through memories, leafing through the pages of nostalgia.

We have turned beautiful memories into photographs.
We laughed, we wrote lyrical poems.
And the bad ones, where are they?
We burn them or hide them in the hidden corners of our hearts.
Yet when the waves of nostalgia become heavy, there is no boat that can save us.

Books say the story of grace is old.
In Eden the beautiful and the ugly were reconciled
to live together in the same garden.
Since then, we speak in the language of the past,
but we never learn enough from it.

Any time we want to gild ourselves, we see that every day
we make mistakes like those that were made before us.
We depart from Eden and find ourselves in Hell.
We eat the forbidden fruit and lower the voice of conscience.
(Sometimes to its demise).

We applaud crazy leaders and erect statues in their honor.
Then we spit on them, throw stones at them and ruin their appearance.

We were counseled to tend to our own gardens,
nurture roses and soulful pines,
but we are tempted to look elsewhere,
to which the sad Ingeborg Bachmann said:
“history teaches, but there are no students.”

There was no yesterday—the prophets say there will be no tomorrow either.
And this judgment is no coincidence,
nor a figment of the imagination of a poetess with a troubled soul.

Before she wrote this she witnessed ships of sorrow sink beneath waves,
touched the fresh blood of the abeles along the great boulevards
and the books of false prophets that are given away.
(Crazy ideas are always given away.)
She had big eyes and could see
how people entered the darkness and became small.

(People are afraid of the dark, but they go deep into it and become shadows.)

Ingeborg said something similar to what our elders have said:
we are punished for our iniquities, our perverted desires.
The ones from yesterday when we crossed the bloody streets
and we did not clean the stains of history,
when we ran away from pain and found refuge in ourselves.

We bear the burdens of our ancestor’s sins upon our shoulders.
They left us ugly memorials and we didn’t destroy them.
They left us bad books and we didn’t burn them.
They sowed our land with weeds and we didn’t clear them away
They left us dusty archives and we didn’t clean them off.

And we march weighed down, laden with the book of nostalgia, with longing, pain, resentment,
transformed
and for millions of years we tell the same stories to those who come behind us.

Ndue Ukaj was born in Kosova. He is a writer, essayist, and literary critic. To date, he has published five poetry books, one short story collections, a novel, and two literary criticism books. He won several awards, including the national award for best book of poetry published in 2010 in Kosovo. His literary works have been published in distinguished international anthologies and journals and have been translated into many languages.