Two Poems

Abstract

58 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 A Swap At the market bus stop I’m waiting with a man in ragged clothes, unshaven, his hair greasy, swinging his hand holding a big plastic bag with “The Big Shopper” written on it. Why did I smile, why did I bite my lip? The corners of my canvas shopping bag heavy with fruit and vegetables are nearly touching the ground. “Shall we swap bags?” He deliberates, scratches himself behind the ear, mumbling something incomprehensible. His bus arrives. He suddenly grabs my bag, leaving his own on the ground for me. Here’s my bus now. I try to lift the bag, but suddenly it’s too heavy, beyond measure. This is how heavy Saint Philothea was when as a thin girl she died for Christ and nobody could lift her off the ground. I strain hard to lift it but haven’t the strength. I open it and in it – a sparrow with eyes rolled back cooped up at the bottom as if in a vault. Why is it that everything that has been and has passed is heavy only in death which “The Big Shopper” can’t pay off? And all that will be and will pass is heavy only in the life of the one who will return my bag to God. Without Me Like the automatic door on a train my life closed. Strangers remained on the platform, but they each knew who they were waving to. In the carriages – suitcases, hubbub, passengers with their feet on the seats. And one booked seat, by the window, which everyone was eyeing from the corridor. In the distance an old woman in black running for the train. She fell exhausted on the grass and the train left without her. I pulled the red emergency brake. The conductor crashed into me. I pushed the door open and jumped out. The train whistled, a shadow loomed through the windows. The old woman in black was nowhere to be seen. And my life left without me. Translations from the Macedonian By Ljubica Arsovska & Patricia Marsh Editorial note: From ЦРНО НА БЕЛО (In black and white) (Skopje; Ili-Ili, 2016) Ljubica Arsovska is editor in chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator from English into Macedonian and vice versa. Her published translations include more than twenty books and plays as well as poems and collected poems by Macedonian poets published in Macedonia and abroad. Patricia Marsh is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for a long period before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992. Two Poems by Lidija Dimkovska poetry ...