She came in black rags, sat down at the fireplace and did not move anymore before spring flowers put their heads out of forgottenness.
What do you want? I said. I cannot share my food with you because I am starving. I cannot tell you stories because nothing happens. And I cannot sing you songs because the joy bird has flown away with the first rainfalls.
Sssht, said the uninvited guest. I will give you to eat. And she got out of her pocket a dirty piece of bread and broke it in two.
I thanked her, went to the toiled and flushed it down. I did not want to eat. I was too tired for food.
Come here, the crone ordered. I can tell you stories.
I stood up, with the pretext of measuring the snow in front of the cottage.
The door was closed. That old beggar in black clothes had shut me in, together with herself. I did not have the strength to jump out of the window. Anyway there was no place to go to. Nobody to open a door and to boil you an egg.
Okay, I said, you have won. So you can also tell me a story. But I hate stories. They are sad when they talk about the black and white winter, and they make me sad when they talk of the colours of summer.
There is a line between summer and winter, the old lady said. This is where stories are made.
My fear was rising. Stories were either dreadful and hurt me, or they were beautiful and hurt me even more. Yet the burden of my invisible self was too big. I did not have the strength anymore to cover my ears and just laid my head onto my arms on the rough, wooden table.
Suddenly the old lady began to hum. They were just simple tunes of only one or two notes. They had no words and therefore bare no memory. They could not hurt.
I lifted my head, laid it down again on the side, observed the old woman with one eye and put my thumb into my mouth, like a human plant sprouting out of the damp ground. Humming had no history and therefore did not hurt. It was something in this dire world to hold onto.
Slowly, slowly, the shadows receded.
Silke Liria©
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Showing posts with label Silke Liria©. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silke Liria©. Show all posts
8/11/08
TRAVELING BY BUS THROUGH ALBANIA by Silke Liria©
It is such a bliss to travel by bus through Albania.
It is so calming to relax on the bus seat and to be carried to far- away places with other friends, through majestic mountains, along deep turquoise rivers and the enchanting sea with its ever-varying rocky bays, passing historical cities with imposing fortresses and beautiful white villages with modest peasants with goodness in every wrinkle. As I cannot read or study on the mostly mountainous roads, I am forced to slow down, to do nothing except enjoying the journey. And I let my thoughts go and find inner peace in this scenery. I am led to philosophy, to think and feel my projects further on from an intuitive side. Each time I return from such a trip, I have become a bit wiser.
The greatest richness of traveling by bus is meeting marvelous people and having a great time. As we are together for several hours, we often begin to form a kind of community. Most bus drivers from the lines Saranda-Tirana-Kosova and Tirana-Tetova know me and are my friends. When I change the bus in Tirana or get into the bus in Prizren, they call me "Saranda!" In buses I have conversed with shepherds and writers, retired people and children. On my last trip from Tirana to the yearly poetry festival in Macedonia, the bus drivers and I gave each other nicknames, in the restaurant we toasted with salt and pepper, and with two students I danced in the bus at four o'clock in the morning! In most of the cases, some passenger or bus driver invites me to eat in one of the restaurants on the road. In the night bus through the night mountains in the North, I am overtired when the bus stops for the second or the third time, anywhere between Rubik and Kukës. Are we in Fushë Arrëz, in Lajthiza, in Shemria? I drag myself out of the bus into the cold air to have a coffee or mountain tea with my friends.
I always admire to what extent the bus drivers feel responsible for all their passengers. Their mobile phone does not stop. They ensure the smooth getting on the right bus or find a hotel for vacationists who come spontaneously to Saranda. Waiting relatives and friends are informed at what time the bus will arrive.. In the buses to Macedonia, we are also offered tea and coffee and sweets, as if we were in a plane. The modern buses to Kosova have video equipment, and mostly we watch New Year videos with popular music and turbo folk and silly humor. Whereas in the older buses in the South, the musical background is the cheerful chatter of the moderator of "Top Albania Radio", who rolls her R in the Tiranian way, together with pop music, or Southern folk, or fiery Greek music.
In one day you change worlds, from Oriental to Mediterranean and back, still speaking Albanian all the time. My soul is imbued, impregnated with beautiful images and good times. When times get tougher again, they appear by themselves before my inner eye: the glittering of the sea just one meter away or deep down the cliffs, or the shrewd mountains under the fairy-like full moon. And the pilaf I have eaten on the Southern mountain pass of Llogara, or the mountain tea I have drunken in Shemria, on the road, on the road, on the road.
8/10/08
BROKEN WINGS OF ICARUS by Silke Liria©,
"That is hybris", her father had claimed in his vain attempt to convince her. "Don't fly. Hybris means to defy your destiny, and all people who did that were punished by the gods." What do you understand about hybris, she thought. Hybris was to know one's destiny and yet not to act accordingly. It would be hybris not to do it. She simply had to fly there; the Eagle's call had been echoing in her guts for years, deafening her during the last months, tearing her heart into pieces with its longing scream. However, her father had surprised her with unexpected insight when he compared her to Icarus. Indeed, how well did she understand his impulsive elevation towards the most irresistible and most shining – and nevertheless the most treacherous and deadly.
Now here she was, on the deserted beach behind cliffs and pine trees, her belly full of wine and little fish like in former times which had been crushed under the hot iron of oblivion.
"You have forgotten", noticed the man with the birdy name beside her, whose face at the airport had been radiant with joy as she had never seen nor expected in him before. "You have forgotten everything."
"My memories are in my body", she said. "But I don't want to remember!" She was not to remember what might have linked them in such an intimate way. She had her comparatively stable life in what one week ago she still would have called her country.
At least she had found now a convincing explanation for the feeling of being home, which had overwhelmed her since her landing or even in the air, when she saw the mountains for the first time and loved them immediately. Back home. Home again after such an unimaginably long time. Oh, finally being back in her motherland, among her people, under the sign of the Eagle. Now the lifelong search for her belonging, her roots, herself had come to an end.
If the country calmed down even more after the riots, maybe she would go even further south on her next, her second visit to the land of her soul. She was determined to look for that sunken place where the sun rose from the sea and fell into the sea again after having drawn a large bow over the water – the floods the fishers sailed away with every morning and returned on in the evening, bringing nets loaded with fish and hands full of warmth to share for the night. Now she remembered the curse-blessing she had howled at the sea out of her anxious longing. "Damned be the sea which took you away, blessed be the sea which brought you again!" It was not easy for a shepherd girl to be a fisherman's wife.
"Tell me more!" she insisted. They had lived a simple life, too simple a life perhaps. She had been the first girl to choose a man out of love, and this love made her suffer as she feared for his life among the waves, and this suffering linked her even more closely to the land under her feet, the sea in her eyes, the sun in her heart.
While listening to him, she could not stop tears running down her cheeks. This was an inner revolution or rather a revelation. The revelation of her true, lost identity, a loss that had been pricking her like red-hot needles for a lifetime. Finally she had come home to herself. Yet conditions had changed. Her former brother was her boyfriend now, whereas her former husband from the white cabin near the sea, the man with the birdy name, could not be but a brother.
"When I came first to the place I was only six or seven years old", the man with the birdy name told her through the salty wind. "Even though I'd never been there before, I knew the place. I remembered it from another life, and I knew, too, that somewhere in this world you would exist. So I began my search for you, first in my country, than after the fall of the dictatorship and the opening of the borders, all over the world. That's what I used my job for. And now I have found you! I have found you!"
When they had left the decaying capital in the morning, she had foreseen that this day would be decisive. She had cancelled all her appointments without letting anybody know. He had kidnapped her with her consent, like a bride whose parents oppose the marriage. As they were driving across the large, sunny square, passing the museum, the riding iron hero and the street where only two days ago she had observed a policeman up to the hips in the floods of the heavy rainfalls, she pronounced solemnly the name of the day. Aware of its vital decisiveness, she erected the day an invisible monument out of sounds. It was the beginning of the so-called Second Autumn, a warm day between the times and therefore prone to revelations and revolutions. Indeed he had revealed her why she was here, why she had to come, who she really was. He had spent a third of a century looking for her. So she had to bow to the evidence of destiny. She was ready now.
When they kissed, she burned all the bridges behind her.
A few days later: flying back. The brutal cultural shock. An icy flat stinking of new paint, making her head ache. And her fax did not move, and her phone bell remained silent. When she called his number, his colleague told her: "He's not in." – "He's not in", the second day. The third day the employee told her that the man with the birdy name had gone to the mines in the north of the country.
She understood that he did not love her, that he had never loved her. But she was profoundly bewildered with all the rest. Who was she? What was real?
At that time a carcinoma began to develop in her breast.
by Silke Liria©
Now here she was, on the deserted beach behind cliffs and pine trees, her belly full of wine and little fish like in former times which had been crushed under the hot iron of oblivion.
"You have forgotten", noticed the man with the birdy name beside her, whose face at the airport had been radiant with joy as she had never seen nor expected in him before. "You have forgotten everything."
"My memories are in my body", she said. "But I don't want to remember!" She was not to remember what might have linked them in such an intimate way. She had her comparatively stable life in what one week ago she still would have called her country.
At least she had found now a convincing explanation for the feeling of being home, which had overwhelmed her since her landing or even in the air, when she saw the mountains for the first time and loved them immediately. Back home. Home again after such an unimaginably long time. Oh, finally being back in her motherland, among her people, under the sign of the Eagle. Now the lifelong search for her belonging, her roots, herself had come to an end.
If the country calmed down even more after the riots, maybe she would go even further south on her next, her second visit to the land of her soul. She was determined to look for that sunken place where the sun rose from the sea and fell into the sea again after having drawn a large bow over the water – the floods the fishers sailed away with every morning and returned on in the evening, bringing nets loaded with fish and hands full of warmth to share for the night. Now she remembered the curse-blessing she had howled at the sea out of her anxious longing. "Damned be the sea which took you away, blessed be the sea which brought you again!" It was not easy for a shepherd girl to be a fisherman's wife.
"Tell me more!" she insisted. They had lived a simple life, too simple a life perhaps. She had been the first girl to choose a man out of love, and this love made her suffer as she feared for his life among the waves, and this suffering linked her even more closely to the land under her feet, the sea in her eyes, the sun in her heart.
While listening to him, she could not stop tears running down her cheeks. This was an inner revolution or rather a revelation. The revelation of her true, lost identity, a loss that had been pricking her like red-hot needles for a lifetime. Finally she had come home to herself. Yet conditions had changed. Her former brother was her boyfriend now, whereas her former husband from the white cabin near the sea, the man with the birdy name, could not be but a brother.
"When I came first to the place I was only six or seven years old", the man with the birdy name told her through the salty wind. "Even though I'd never been there before, I knew the place. I remembered it from another life, and I knew, too, that somewhere in this world you would exist. So I began my search for you, first in my country, than after the fall of the dictatorship and the opening of the borders, all over the world. That's what I used my job for. And now I have found you! I have found you!"
When they had left the decaying capital in the morning, she had foreseen that this day would be decisive. She had cancelled all her appointments without letting anybody know. He had kidnapped her with her consent, like a bride whose parents oppose the marriage. As they were driving across the large, sunny square, passing the museum, the riding iron hero and the street where only two days ago she had observed a policeman up to the hips in the floods of the heavy rainfalls, she pronounced solemnly the name of the day. Aware of its vital decisiveness, she erected the day an invisible monument out of sounds. It was the beginning of the so-called Second Autumn, a warm day between the times and therefore prone to revelations and revolutions. Indeed he had revealed her why she was here, why she had to come, who she really was. He had spent a third of a century looking for her. So she had to bow to the evidence of destiny. She was ready now.
When they kissed, she burned all the bridges behind her.
A few days later: flying back. The brutal cultural shock. An icy flat stinking of new paint, making her head ache. And her fax did not move, and her phone bell remained silent. When she called his number, his colleague told her: "He's not in." – "He's not in", the second day. The third day the employee told her that the man with the birdy name had gone to the mines in the north of the country.
She understood that he did not love her, that he had never loved her. But she was profoundly bewildered with all the rest. Who was she? What was real?
At that time a carcinoma began to develop in her breast.
by Silke Liria©
8/9/08
POSEIDON'S PHONE by Silke Liria©
It fits exactly into my hand, as if it were made just for me. Its form is the most perfect form existing on earth. I touch it with my left index, following the road on the top. It is spiraling and my finger and my mind with it, in this movement which has made the universe and develops it further. Big, open curves at first, tightening more and more, life concentrates increasingly, becomes denser, and at the same time the spiral rises to a hill with a little road around, which is now so small that my finger doesn't fit anymore. Finally, the top. The world collapses into one point, spaceless, timeless, where all movement is cushioned in quietude and silence.
The way back, life becomes individualized again, we can talk again of a walk, of a road, of behind and before and yesterday and tomorrow. On the top, the pure being is sufficient for itself; now it moves and is moved, seeks development, becoming, doing. Spiraling around, the old ways repeat themselves, but always larger, with ever greater perspective and understanding and wisdom and compassion.
On it goes until the end, the edge between the outside and the inside, between being and non-being, which is only a different way of being. The edge is huge, sharp, cutting, like the painfulness of transition.
There are many roads now, not only the one on the top, the one on the outside, the most prominent one. All the surface in its unique form is composed of parallel roads like those of humans on Earth, and my fingers turn around, turn around, following several at the same time. They are carved in lime, none deviates on its course. Yet each one has its own personality with its own scars. Some of these scars are shared.
After the first huge turn, the way continues inside. My fingers, feeling carefully in order not to commit a sacrilege, enter a cave, the mystery of origin of mankind, of skillfulness and language. The mystery of the world womb, the unspeakable feminine, and also a retreat for the life-tired and heart-broken. Then the cave, without ending, narrows as much as to impede my fingers to continue their research. Behind, in the innermost core of the world, there is the Secret, which can not be understood with human brains and which can only be seen with the Third Eye. This is the barrier beyond which the material cannot go. This is the other realm, containing the Core, the Essence, of which the top on the outside, the point where all movements converge in stillness, is only an exteriorized reflection.
How can such a unique, artful structure with astonishing mastery, a lime reflection of the deepest timeless wisdom of the universe, have formed itself? This can only be an Immortal's masterpiece. Poseidon has made it. And Poseidon, the Amazing, the Majestuous, the Terrible, my beloved brother, has given me his unique gift through the hand of an old friend, the sea-dog Nuredin. It is a telephone. A white mobile phone from one of these salty zones where the Immortal encounters the mortals, given as a souvenir from my Sarandian host, to phone Poseidon whenever I am far away from the sea, to listen to his voice, to hear the sea.
(C) 2004 Silke Liria Blumbach
The way back, life becomes individualized again, we can talk again of a walk, of a road, of behind and before and yesterday and tomorrow. On the top, the pure being is sufficient for itself; now it moves and is moved, seeks development, becoming, doing. Spiraling around, the old ways repeat themselves, but always larger, with ever greater perspective and understanding and wisdom and compassion.
On it goes until the end, the edge between the outside and the inside, between being and non-being, which is only a different way of being. The edge is huge, sharp, cutting, like the painfulness of transition.
There are many roads now, not only the one on the top, the one on the outside, the most prominent one. All the surface in its unique form is composed of parallel roads like those of humans on Earth, and my fingers turn around, turn around, following several at the same time. They are carved in lime, none deviates on its course. Yet each one has its own personality with its own scars. Some of these scars are shared.
After the first huge turn, the way continues inside. My fingers, feeling carefully in order not to commit a sacrilege, enter a cave, the mystery of origin of mankind, of skillfulness and language. The mystery of the world womb, the unspeakable feminine, and also a retreat for the life-tired and heart-broken. Then the cave, without ending, narrows as much as to impede my fingers to continue their research. Behind, in the innermost core of the world, there is the Secret, which can not be understood with human brains and which can only be seen with the Third Eye. This is the barrier beyond which the material cannot go. This is the other realm, containing the Core, the Essence, of which the top on the outside, the point where all movements converge in stillness, is only an exteriorized reflection.
How can such a unique, artful structure with astonishing mastery, a lime reflection of the deepest timeless wisdom of the universe, have formed itself? This can only be an Immortal's masterpiece. Poseidon has made it. And Poseidon, the Amazing, the Majestuous, the Terrible, my beloved brother, has given me his unique gift through the hand of an old friend, the sea-dog Nuredin. It is a telephone. A white mobile phone from one of these salty zones where the Immortal encounters the mortals, given as a souvenir from my Sarandian host, to phone Poseidon whenever I am far away from the sea, to listen to his voice, to hear the sea.
(C) 2004 Silke Liria Blumbach
8/8/08
PARADISE BIRD by Silke Liria©
I reach into my chest and find a tiny, red, pulsating cushion. It feels so smooth in my hand, its warmth passes into my hand, my arm, my soul. Yet bare of its ribbon cage, it trembles of cold or of fear, feeling utterly naked and exposed, not knowing from which side will come the next blow, the next insult, the next catastrophe.
Ssshhh, I whisper to my heart. Be still and feel that you are safe. Be still and feel that all is good.
Are the warm, deep red drops, which glide down my wrist, tears or blood?
Don’t be afraid, I speak softly to my heart. From now on I will protect you. This is a new time, and some houses on the beach are white.
I dress my strange heart of mine with feathers in all colors. Feathers of the hens and the elegant white sea hens, of the roosters and the fat black sea roosters. Of hawks and eagles. Of parrots and ice birds and many other birds which I know only as fluffy feather balls in shining colors on the four horizons of the sky.
I throw my heart like a bird of joy into the blue open. Fly, my little heart. Fly, my paradise bird. You don’t need a cage anymore.
You will feel joy. You’ll be a joy.
Silke Liria©
8/7/08
THE MIDWIFE...by Silke Liria©
The midwife knocked on my door on one evening of damp earth. She looked like a farmer with her big boots and her bucket full of water. She put the bucket down in my living room, waited until her breath would be calm and said then: "So. Here I am to get the baby."
"What baby?" I wondered and stared at the midwife. "But I am not pregnant at all! How will you get a baby? I haven't even slept with a man!"
"That is none of my business", replied the midwife. "I was sent here to deliver you. Lay down on the sofa."
I obeyed, protesting already somewhat weaker: "There is nothing to deliver."
"There is always something to deliver!" said the midwife firmly. "Normally babies, but you won't believe me what strange things I have already pulled out of women!"
I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I didn't want to see the instruments, which reminded me the teeth-puller I feared as much as normal people fear dogs.
"Do you think dogs have group souls or individual souls?" I asked the midwife, suddenly convinced that she might know the answer, because she knew things about me not even I did know.
The woman did not answer, but put her hands on my head and my chest and my belly. I did not even wonder that she had three hands. I just wondered whether she would deliver a puppy or a book.
8/6/08
If only...by Silke Liria© 08
I want to share with you the beauty, (that is a gift) when born a woman~
If only
The ring out of the seashell
Was not broken
It was
My engagement ring
With the Sea
by Silke Liria© 08
~
I lived in Saranda, Albania, at the Ionian Sea,
which is a part of the Mediterranean.
Saranda has been the love of my
life, and I have been very fond of the sea.
When in August 2004 I traveled to Georgia,
and spent some days at the
Black Sea in Batumi with some friends, one of them, Keti, found for me
a snail shell with a hole, which was like a ring and fit me perfectly
and was beautiful.
I wore it often until it broke...
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