Alisa Velaj, Albanian Poet

Posted by: the Editor | May 18, 2010

Alisa Velaj, Albanian Poet

Alisa Velaj was born in the southern port town of Vlora in November 1982. She studied Albanian language and literature at the University of Tirana. She follows M.A. in literature with the writer Mitrush Kuteli and now teaches literature at the university of Durres. Velaj is the author of two verse collections: Themelet e eres (Foundations of the wind) and Drejt ajrit (To air).

Featured Poetry of Alisa Velaj
(Translated into English by: Laureta Petoshati)

Odyssey’s Monologue
(Before the arrival)

I’ll be back one day
In the same place I got departed
With the wall eyes from the horror
I’ll watch you
That escape’s illusion
always you mixed up with the true return.
Forthright foreign countries
I have never departed.
But my clay boated in the seas
that appeared suddenly in horizon.

My homesickness obsesses me ruefully!

I have never left indeed……

My friend coral

I have my awakening green
in the last moment of acerbity
and I smell the fragrance of green grass
it is not found anywhere…..

What to tell you more,
My friend coral
Happens to be chewed
even the azure, sometimes !

Clearing

I’m sober always
In the last minute
when the butterfly around the bulb
becomes cinder.
Its height now turned to ashes
Is falling as dusty dew
over my palm.

Then, I turn off the light
Like lightening I inflame a match.

Ballade

Were flying birds around the abandoned houses
In the front yard the thorns reaching up the sky.

No wand could take water out from any stone
Was told the rain was in its time.

Height

You are a chip
In my height.

A fire that draws near my limbs
And worn out my knees.

I am a chip
In your height

That’s way you’re going
Askance the flame.

Candles

I hold colder skies than yours over my shoulder
And a lot of flamed candles
For the birthday cakes that I lost somewhere

You’re telling me to hush tonight
Under the stars performance
Just to look at their downfall
With the same hunger
That aforetime I coveted sea fizzes.

Now, in my hands the candles are melting down
And I don’t know where to put them.

Revival

Above, among the branches
Nothing more than a leaf

Cry for the birds!

When the death get corded

Over the pyre in the marketplace are piling up dry branches
Sylvia Plath
These dry branches shouldn’t been corded here
Is high noon when all the crowd
Is going to pass hereabouts
Wood phantasm is going to horrify the sleepwalker
With that medulla dried in the bones.
He is going to conduct the sleepwalk into the crowd
(As a current get transmitted by a conductor)

One can do the heap in the marketplace
But not at all
No way
In broad daylight.

Poetic cycle

1.
The house

The house ready to fall in is yours, and
the trees fallen last night by the storm belong to your yard

let me contour your dimensions in another expanse
where the roof beams are safer
and the roots take place in non slippery loam

than let me hug you not being scared of anything.

2.
Underground

Neither sound in the gloaming
Cannot claw the silence
neither clicking door
doesn’t excite me any feeling
I cower in your chest as a wounded seagull
From the windy rattles that invoice even the daffiest.
And from the bohemian fear
For not losing the things that
I never had.

3.
Conscious

Your insecurity makes me very confused

Because the winds always have crooked the trees
And the cuckoo bird has yowled as ever in the branches

But leafs have never been converted to cuckoo birds convey.

4.
Red carnations

Red carnations
Secluded in the glassy pot

Sleepy over the pillow
Inbreathes my being

The red carnations are sanguineous,
Empurpled, I’m telling you.

5.
Leaf

The leaf fell again
In the same layer

Is the same raked up soil
Wrought last night with harrow

The fundaments remained ajar
With some stone
Fallen from somewhere
Which another furrow
Has plowed in the memory.