Les plus lus ▸
Ndrek Gjini
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.
in the dark street two women
carry a coffin between them
in my dark thought
no god is present
in the dark O touch and see
a music without rules
Can you believe
how many songs have been committed to stone
& none to the water that wears it down?
How many lines get lifted from the surf–
& none from the living ocean?
I was the dead girl who lay in the coffin
with her corona of hair cut short.
I wasn’t listening to that stranger
whose hands held their fire,
whose teeth trapped dust.
But when the women one
by one stood up to testify
I heard the first rumor of rain.
It was as if I’d awakened precipitously
in the night, forehead filled
with mist & the dreams
as if at the event horizon
of a black hole
we go
to extreme lengths
out on a twig
i see asterisks as halos
i twitter like a finch
in a cage
you are
beside yourself
an angel of anxiety
in perpetual molt
let’s feather our nest
with eviction notices
get to the bottom
of this hope chest
Shaking uncontrollably,
Trembling in fear.
I inflict another,
Blinded by tears.
Please stop giving,
Useless advice.
Reasons to create,
More scars to hide.
Shivering and crying,
Suddenly I stop.
The world goes blurry,
Paralysed with shock.
Family members,
Gathered around.
Someone's coffin,
Lowered into the ground.
I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you’d stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.
And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew
Of living idiots pressing round that new
Oak coffin--they alive, I dead beneath
That board--you’d rave and rend them with your teeth.
My arms are round you, and I lean
Against you, while the lark
Sings over us, and golden lights, and green
Shadows are on your bark.
There’ll come a season when you’ll stretch
Black boards to cover me:
Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch,
With worms eternally.
Crimson is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)
Undertakers, hearse drivers, grave diggers,
I speak to you as one not afraid of your business.
You handle dust going to a long country,
You know the secret behind your job is the same whether
you lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery,
well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the
body is laid in by naked hands and then covered
by the shovels.
Your day's work is done with laughter many days of the
year,
And you earn a living by those who say good-by today
in thin whispers.