Godo Is Not Coming

Ndue Ukaj
In a stormy weather, The road from Ireland is closed
In rainy nights, the sea cannot be crossed with small steps
When swallowed by solitude just as the Earth cracked from the earthquake
When pain has no time neither scientific decoding.
Godo is not coming, is late, the welcome has contaminated him
In a comfortable sleep, is bending your dreams and my dreams.
He is not coming, neither in the tree of life nor in the theater of surprises
He is doing the sleep of welcome which your time doesn’t recognize... our time does not either
You are waiting, just as the bride waiting for her husband on the abandoned bed,
Dreaming with open arms while he brings the sack full of dreams
When he places his hands softly, just as in lovely hair...you relax in there
And begging for your dream, which is intertwined in your long fingers.
Suddenly a bite astounded your body, the hand flew from the sack.
You are wiping your forehead and understand that Godo is not here, neither his puzzling look is not here.
Nevertheless you are not convinced that your dream is in a sack.
It was tied as a noos forever just as Godo’s arrival.
Just as the lightning crossing over the river of words flowing ferociously
Just as your steps through dreams full of surprises towards the guards of time
Which make the noise of life and the dream of welcome.
And instill hope that Godo is going to come.
No, Godo is not coming...!
You are crying frantically until your tears have made a creek
Between your cheek bones and their continuous flow.
When the heart beats are felt just as the steps of the unknown
When sadness is knocking in the black night
Even Godo would have taken in his nail and be thrown away.



Godo Is Coming

Stop crying continuously, Godo is coming
The storm has stopped, the road from Ireland is open
He has softened his turbulent vision and his sadness of Achilles
Even the pain in his chest has healed.
He is coming through the Tree of Life.
Where you have created the nest of welcome
With a swamp of wishes noosly tied.
Godo is coming with the music of sea full of silence.
Your welcome has given him courage,
He is coming with the sack full of enigmas,
Nearby the rotten Tree
Where you wait to enter your shaking hands
That were bitten by the irony of endless waiting.
And the words that were changing their shape every morning.
Your bulb does not trust time, neither for the waiting and Godo’s arrival.
With the branches of tree designs the crown of victory. What a great joy.
With reduced hopes until the lost confidence, dissolves the vision
And is crossing the furious river without being recognized.
Suddenly comes back.
Sitting nearby a tree with your shining items
Where the white lights swallow your emotionate vision.
Where you are saving the nostalgia of reception. The heart’s step.
Through the tired fingers are counting the theater of absurdities
With naked aktors nearby which
The spectators are spread through the meridians of death.
While waiting for Godo.
And the fear from the sneak on the rotten Tree,
Which is whiping continuously.
Therefore Godo is coming, your reception has made him courageous.
Near the tree of life
With the team of actors to build the theater of salvation for you.
And the time of reception to last until he comes.


Godo Is Here

It is night, the storm is going mad
Your wet body is shaking from the heavy rain
Under the tree of life while waiting for Godo.
The reception has transformed you into a modern statue.
Where the lonely birds and night crows have their life nests.
Your solitude is crouching as a tied sneak
Between which the poisonous tongue is vitalized.
Suddenly is heard an energetic beating, you did not hear it.
Your ears are closed from the warms climbing over your body.
Climbing just as the old man in front of the law on Kafka’s story.
Waiting to enter in the mysteries of law, I am sorry, I meant mysteries of Godo.
To understand the mystery of absurdity in equal level
With those of dehumanization.
My God,
Godo is here, with his confusing look and his torn sack,
With lost desires during the long road of return
Under the tree of life where you waited endlessly.
You did not recognize him,
He returned with a different face which you never imagined.
With the tired voice you had never heard,
With the turbulent vision you had seen.
Sadness astounded your body. The warms are falling down
From your body which is transformed into waiting.
Sadly you grabbed the spoiled head, and run through his sack
While searching your dried dreams just as the autumn leafs
Through which the drunk feet are walking
And your tears started falling in your neck and cheek
You felt in the arms of sadness
Welcomed him just as the bride waiting for the groom in the abandoned bed,
While dreaming with open arms to have nearby the sack full of dreams
Where softly you place your hands, just as in the lovely hair...relaxing there
And begging for your dream, intertwined in your long fingers.
And while wiping your forehead you understand that Godo arrived and your wait remained an endless wait.
(Translated by Peter Tase)











The Emigrant
He has only questions, his answers so very timid
In ***** pockets with concreted nostalgia.
He has only memories that surround his neck
Like the millstone they shake him one step forward and a few backward,
While caressing in torrential waterfall,
And kidnapping the time which he never sees.
The time that he only dreams in endless nights.
He is not one of those below the sky full of storms,
Where he walks, where he eats, where he makes love and seating.
The fatherland of birds is the sky
Of the fish is the sea
Of the emigrant is sorrow
Which is multiplied like clouds in the turbulent sky.
On the unknown roads, nostalgia shifts
While searching for one amid endless zeroes.
Odyssey’s testament is burning in his hand,
And coal threaten fire; like tropical rays
Toward the missed Ithaca he directs his eyes
And he is exhausted day and night.
He migrates on the roads of sadness
And is covered with the quilt of Promised Land,
And every night dreams the same dream. The return to number one.
While the desert oasis swallows his aspirations, and memories.
Causing deep desperation to the Emigrant.
With the sack of sorrow travels through the roads of hope
Awaiting decisions to become as number one, in the endless zeroes
Every day waits for him the unknown in the forest of desires
Where it is relaxing, the soft vision and the deep meditation.
Like a freezing bird is searching the nest of hope.
And is covered with the quilt of Promised Land.
(Inspired by the book of Milan Kundera: “The ignorance”)

You gave me the child
that seamed my belly
& stitched up my life.

You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.

You gave me darkness, light, laughter
& the certain knowledge
that we someday die.

You gave me seven years
during which the cells of my body
died & were reborn.

Now we have died
into the limbo of lost loves,
that wreckage of memories
tarnishing with time,
that litany of losses
which grows longer with the years,
as more of our friends
descend underground
& the list of our loved dead
outstrips the list of the living.

Knowing as we do
our certain doom,
knowing as we do
the rarity of the gifts we gave
& received,
can we redeem
our love from the limbo,
dust it off like a fine sea trunk
found in an attic
& now more valuable
for its age & rarity
than a shining new one?

Probably not.
This page is spattered
with tears that streak the words
lose, losses, limbo.

I stand on a ledge in hell
still howling for our love

THE flowers we planted in the tender spring,
And through the summer watched their blossoming,
Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather,
Died and dropped downward altogether.

Today in April in the vivid grass
They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow,
They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass,
Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.

But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,
He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead,
And spring poured not her colors on the meadow,
He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.

Oh, the frosted trees
the North Wind blows
like delicate skeletons
at home in the snow

Sway and shed
your frosty attire
down warm necks
like icy spires

There is fun to be had
in the frost bitten forest
dropping wint'ry surprises
all over the tourists

It is sad to think all fun
must come to an end
as the warm sun smiles
to melt malicious pretend

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death's feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother's womb.

No luck today on my mendicant rounds;
From village to village I dragged myself.
At sunset I find myself with miles of mountains
between me and my hut.
The wind tears at my frail body,
And my little bowl looks so forlorn --
Yes this is my chosen path that guides me
Through disappointment and pain, cold and hunger.

blurred through the mumbling atomic cafe
i thought i heard you say
i am become deaf
destroyer of words
but you were breath
become butterfly effect
spiraling within the stereophonic white-noise drone
of a static radio station
tuned to the music of the silent colossal rotation
of the planets, stars, sun and moon
behind the drawn curtain of a vanished polaroid

still these beating hearts to a murmur
slow these breathing lungs to a whisper
and attach the cello strings of your bloodstream
to that glittering confetti cloud of satellites
strobing, circling the sphere of our atmosphere
strung out on geo-synchronicity
the turning tunnel of the tides
the aeon-spanning volcanic swirl of magma
subsonically writhing
beneath the magnetic pull of the ocean floor
and just...listen...

can you hear the flaming  crackle
of the fire burning in our bellies?
if we slit our stomachs open
the flames that spill from our hari-kiri'd entrails
will fill the darkness in the corner of our closet
and burn it to ashes

in a dream
i saw us laughing together many years from now

when the blast-furnace of our blood, sweat, tears and acid dreams gapes wide
we will laugh in it's face
at the absurdities
of death and taxes

and as the years push through
we will laugh
as we go blind in our old age
growing brighter than the glow
from within the dollhouse home we assembled
from sticks n stones

and we will grow gray together
and fill the soles in our shoes
the holes in our soles
with the dirt, rust, ash, concrete and angel dust
of these city streets

and we will laugh like pyromaniacs
as we **** on burial plots
soil our own graves
and erase our fingerprint smudges
from the blueprints
of our jailbreak escape plan

flames will erupt from the holes in our heads
consume us
spread in a tectonic shock-wave
and lick the pale toes of angels and dreaming junkies
hovering on ghost clouds of ***** soot
just above the foot of our bed

the outlines of our bodies will liquify, disintegrate
and reform as the jagged teeth of a cityscape skyline
crowned crookedly upon the head of a crippled pigeon
ascending in a stuttering climb
towards a heaven
that does not exist
for us

shaking ash and bone-dust from twisted feather
our flames will spread further
devour prehistoric forests
**** roots and tree trunks to bare bone
and march in a coronation parade
upon the city gates
behind a revolutionary brigade
of angry red army ants

finally, those flames
will surround a broken boombox
lost behind a landfill-mound
of moth-chewed cardboard moving boxes
containing the soft stains of dream and memory
tagged, painted, and graffitied
in white out, in sharpie
duct tape peeling from perforated speakers
the flashlight-sized battery compartment
an empty coffin

i didn't cry the day you died. i'm sorry. the reality that you had passed away at barely twenty-five didn't really hit me, even at your eulogy and that still haunts me. they say that denial is the first stage of addiction but I assumed that you knew that death was a possible side-effect of your prescription. about two weeks after your wake, it hit me like a train. i was riding the n judah to the end of the line at ocean beach when I passed a throw-up piece that you had painted a few years before in the train tunnel near haight and cole. it was a big letter "a" in lowercase with an exclamation point next to it. i once asked you what it meant. you shrugged and said, "i just like the shape of it," and something clicked. it was then that i realized (that)

the flames of our light, love and laughter
move faster than the speed of life
and those flames pass us by in the blink of an eye
if we're not quick enough to catch 'em
and return the letters like stars
we borrowed, typed, stole, scribbled and scrawled across the pages of the sky
back to the sprawling library of the night
where they belong    
where we belong

Australia takes her pen in hand
To write a line to you,
To let you fellows understand
How proud we are of you.

From shearing shed and cattle run,
From Broome to Hobson's Bay,
Each native-born Australian son
Stands straighter up today.

The man who used to "**** his drum",
On far-out Queensland runs
Is fighting side by side with some
Tasmanian farmer's sons.

The fisher-boys dropped sail and oar
To grimly stand the test,
Along that storm-swept Turkish shore,
With miners from the west.

The old state jealousies of yore
Are dead as Pharaoh's sow,
We're not State children any more —
We're all Australians now!

Our six-starred flag that used to fly
Half-shyly to the breeze,
Unknown where older nations ply
Their trade on foreign seas,

Flies out to meet the morning blue
With Vict'ry at the prow;
For that's the flag the Sydney flew,
The wide seas know it now!

The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel,
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.

The honoured graves beneath the crest
Of Gaba Tepe hill
May hold our bravest and our best,
But we have brave men still.

With all our petty quarrels done,
Dissensions overthrown,
We have, through what you boys have done,
A history of our own.

Our old world diff'rences are dead,
Like weeds beneath the plough,
For English, Scotch, and Irish-bred,
They're all Australians now!

So now we'll toast the Third Brigade
That led Australia's van,
For never shall their glory fade
In minds Australian.

Fight on, fight on, unflinchingly,
Till right and justice reign.
Fight on, fight on, till Victory
Shall send you home again.

And with Australia's flag shall fly
A spray of wattle-bough
To symbolise our unity —
We're all Australians now.