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Sad, Ndrek Gjini, in English Clear filters

SadNdrek Gjini

I’m Not the Black Cat

I am not the black cat. There were four of us; my grandmother, a black cat, a myth, and I. My grandmother often told us a myth. When you are ill, she said, if a black cat comes and sits on your bed it means that you will die soon. I was only six, seriously ill. Our black cat
SadNdrek Gjini

Epitaphs

The weight of misfortune has stooped my shoulders But I don’t intend to stop for a good while yet; I afflict my own destiny And don’t want anyone to mourn for my fate. I’ve made peace with God on my losses And agreed with him on the epitaphs That should be written about my senseless wars.
SadNdrek Gjini

Closed Doors

It happened years ago, I left. After I walked just two or three steps, I heard the door anxiously being closed. I don’t know why but ever since that moment the sound that the door made echoes in my ears like the clatter of a handful of pebbles on a coffin. I started to hate the closure of doors. To me they sound like coffin lids.
SadNdrek Gjini

My Father

My father is 88. Yesterday I got a letter from him. He said he has not been feeling very well lately for in these last six months he has lost four of his friends and three of his teeth.
SadNdrek Gjini

A Ruthless Rebel Is My Yearning

My eyes are not like doors to just close and sleep. A ruthless rebel is my yearning. It desperately keeps fighting with my past. I close my eyes to welcome sleep, yet unconsciously the pale face of the moon and that of my mothers in the agony of her death, walk the alleys of my memory. Slowly. In silence. Keeping me awake.
SadNdrek Gjini

Mourning

On this rainy afternoon while I walk alone the streets the music that my shoes make on the wet asphalt sounds to my ears like a funeral symphony and my walk like a dead march. Casually raising my eyes to the mountain in front me I notice that the white cloud which in the morning was kissing the mountain is there no more. So, I say to myself; ‘these wet drops falling are not the rain drops,
SadNdrek Gjini

The Train of My Life

It departed at 8:32pm on 1st October, 1963 from a maternity hospital in a small town in North Albania, stopped at a creche to collect some cries, toys, ink spilt on shirts and trousers, a broken pencil. Other stops included dull classes with mountains of books, copies, fights, loves, hates, mistakes, first kisses, white dust from the chalk, lost shoes on football pitches. Then it stopped again at different workplaces where the head was not needed at all, just the arms, because the bosses were the ones
SadNdrek Gjini

How to Read the Wind

My mother did not die of old age, nor did any illness lay her low in bed. Her worries for us, the fugitives, broke her heart, and one day she decided to not breathe anymore. Her last breath became wind, and it’s blowing wild on this November day, whistling and singing to my ears, sometimes as a lullaby, other times a lament. And very often the wind says to me: ‘Why so late my son?’

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