From its first line, Ndrek Gjini’s poem places physical strain and continued motion side by side. The speaker’s shoulders are stooped by “the weight of misfortune,” yet the very next line insists, “I don’t intend to stop for a good while yet.” The word “weight” lands heavily at the start, and the dragging cadence of “misfortune has stooped my shoulders” seems to mime that burden before the voice straightens into resistance. What emerges is not a boast of invincibility but a quiet, stubborn refusal to be defined solely by suffering.
That refusal is reinforced by syntax. The semicolon after “yet” holds the two halves of the thought in tension: weariness on one side, continuation on the other. The repeated “And” at the start of later lines gives the poem something of a litany, as if the speaker is reciting settled terms rather than confessing them. The first four lines establish the speaker’s relationship to hardship: misfortune has bent him, but it has not ended him. The phrase “I afflict my own destiny” is particularly arresting because it reverses the expected direction of pain. Normally destiny afflicts a person; here the speaker claims the verb for himself, suggesting that he is not merely a victim of what happens to him but an active, even aggressive participant in his own fate. That grammatical reversal is the hinge of the poem. It turns stooped shoulders into a posture of endurance rather than collapse, and it prepares for the second movement’s strange, almost contractual calm.
The final three lines shift from the body to the afterlife of the self. The speaker says he has “made peace with God on my losses / And agreed with him on the epitaphs / That should be written about my senseless wars.” The verb “agreed” is crucial. It does not describe submission or pleading; it describes negotiation between two parties who have reached terms. Gjini’s speaker does not ask for pity, does not demand that his suffering be explained, and does not ask to be mourned. Instead, he wants control over the final words. The epitaphs — plural, as if multiple inscriptions may be needed — become the place where meaning is settled. If the wars were “senseless,” then the act of writing their epitaphs is the act of giving them a deliberate, lasting shape. There is no promise that the wars make sense, only that the speaker will have a say in how they are remembered.
The poem is free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme, but it holds together through balance and repetition. The two stanzas mirror each other: both begin with a completed act — “The weight... has stooped,” “I’ve made peace” — then move toward a refusal or arrangement that looks forward. The language is deliberately plain, almost spare, so that words like “weight,” “afflict,” “mourn,” “peace,” and “epitaphs” carry the full emotional argument. There is little decoration; the imagery is limited to the body of the speaker and the implied stone of an epitaph. This restraint makes the poem feel like a fragment of a longer inner life, overheard at the moment when suffering is converted into resolve.
At its centre is the idea that a person cannot always choose what happens to them, but may still claim the right to choose the words that follow — including the words that will outlast them. What makes the poem significant is its refusal of melodrama. It could easily have been a cry against fate or a plea for sympathy, but Gjini pushes it elsewhere. The speaker acknowledges loss without surrendering dignity, and he addresses God not as a dependent but as someone with whom terms can be reached. In only seven lines, the poem moves from physical weariness to a kind of spiritual self-authorship, suggesting that even senseless struggle can be given form, if not justification, by the one who endures it.