Poems by Mirela Leka Xhava

Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού

Biography: Mirela Leka Xhava, was born in the city of Elbasan, Albania. She graduated in Albanian Language and Literature and worked as a Librarian at the University of the city. She also collaborated as a correspondent for the newspaper “Elbasani”. In the end of the year 1999 her first book “I do not love winter in the eye” was published. She has published poetry in several national and international literary magazines recently. She also participated in several contests and anthologies and received different evaluations positives.At the same time he deals with translations from French for several literary magazines in Albania. In September of this year, her last book of poems “Flowers of the Montesquieu street” was published. Lives and works in Bordeaux -France with her family since 2002.

Journey to the center of yourself
(Know thyself!-Socrates)

In the ancient cities, I walked lightly on invisible tracks
feet, toes,
that draw me like a magnet towards humanity
disappeared with the scrolls that were never discovered,
over millennia, centuries so far and so close
woven threads of genesis up to me.

Whispers of souls,
allegorical ghosts of an underground world of ruins
where the pharaohs who preferred the end as a mummy in a sarcophagus sleep
Macbethian kings with macabre bloody dreams
the inventors of the knives that would kill them and the architects of the pyramids in the afterlife to save them.

Also sleep the actors who played in the amphitheatres of olden days
the tragedy of others while forgetting oneselve’s

Also sleep the bones of the always fatalistic “common people” ,
rebellious every so often, Spartan
simply killed
to exchange an evil for an evil.

Nature in its “Deluge” floods all
Exhumes them one by one as a last judgment
to put back together the losers and the winners.

In ancient cities
The dead are on earth and
under and we look for them
to be revived.

Impression of Height
Here so high
the clouds stay down,
and the birds,

and the earth,
and people.
In the heights of the sky
surprisingly not even the gods wait for you
nor the saints
nor the souls

nor the aliens.

Blue and only blue

whiteness and only whiteness.
This rare harmony disrupted by noises of planes
suddenly awaking a beam of lightning,
perhaps Zeus stirred the heavens
seeing us somewhere
up there
even higher
Above people
Above the ground
Above the birds
Above the clouds

Above the skies…

The flowers of Montesquieu Street

Flowers at the foot of tall walls
they smile shyly at the midday sun
the wonderful flowers of Montesquieu street
they greet some gray-haired passersby
in that absolute silence, absence of sound
the solitary Muses of wordless poetry
no dog, no cat, no breath around
cars rushing on paranoid rampage.

There is no time for meditation, there is no time for anything
just for fleeing, blind escape from everything,
not even for those, the fragile, dressed in March colors
flowers of Montesquieu street.

I stopped my step, I felt the scent in my soul
as well as the pentagram of peace.
How I would love to share it with the world
to plant them on the noisy scrap metal
turned into a giant walking vase,
endless flowers, to bring white seasons..!