KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Alisa Velaj
THE SUN'S SHORES
“What terrifies you most in purity?” I asked.
“Haste,” William answered.
An excerpt from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
From now on I am your unreachable present
You are my already abandoned past
Over there on the shores of the shadows
On the sun’s left
Every morning on the sun’s right cactuses bloom flowers
Enduring no more than your haste can handle
Then, with purity, they embrace sunsets
To greet light again at dawns
You are my already abandoned yesterday
Between you and me, two eyes of a distant eagle
From the hardly visible mountain on the sun’s shores
THERE WAS A TIME
There was a time
Called the time of leaves
When you and I
When both of us
Discovered the Moon
In an unknown remote forest
You had found greenery
Buried in darkness
I had encountered you
Travelling towards light
Then we learned to find
Trees and leaves with ease
In the thicket of darkness
In the thicket of light
You love me and the moon
There came a time
Again they called it the time of leaves
But the lost forest could not be found
And the moon suddenly hid
From you
You loved me no more
You no more knew what or whom you loved…
YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN AN UNINVITED GUEST, ARES
The thought that I had lost you
Appeared to me in a dream tonight, Ares
A flame struggled to devour
A crucified Christ
And I, horrified, in a roofless room
Protected myself from the bats running into the walls
Ares, my sadness was so deep
That I woke up from the dream with much haste
Outside the roof tiles flew with the wind
And the bats lay dead in the yard
Like Pyrrhus’ soldiers after the battle…
It was better that you did not appear in that horrible mess
You would have been an uninvited guest, Ares…
SWANS OF NIGHTMARES
Farewell
My sad hero
Farewell
Swans of nightmares
Will always leave
My lake of love legacies
Of troubled symphonies
Even if another love
Comes in
Even if it
Is greater than pain
Farewell
To you fleeing as fast as wind
Farewell
You always failed
To tell the white from the blue
And so you pawned me
This sadness of colours
Carrying a soul I cannot read
Whenever dusks fall
Whenever swans
Call on their songs…
A SAGA
At sunset
The ivory shore
Changed into a bay and a season of firs
There I have met both water and fire
Wind sounds
Fell fearfully on leaves
And became birds
Then at the end of winter
The fire sailed
Towards another bay
And the birds
Fled from the greenery
Then bending my body down
I watched the corals
And blessed the fir
With its face turned towards the East…
THERE WILL COME A NIGHT
Never force yourself into singing songs
Let the sounds find the path leading to you
For there will come a time
A time will come
When the ghosts of the hallow tree
On which you are building your house
Will conquer your forest, your yard, your being
As if they were metastasis of darkness
Invading a church that has never been a church
Never trust the song
For the cuckoo often hides itself in the nightingale’s voice
The nightingale, yes, the nightingale is always the nightingale
Train your ears so that the sounds cannot deceive you
For there will come a night
A night will come
When the heart of the hallow tree
Will be our final home
Then every morning the nightingales will migrate never to return
And you will remain a cuckoo sharing company with the blind night
Alisa Velaj (born 1982, Vlorë, Albania) is an Abanian poet whose work has appeared in a number of print and online international magazines, including “Blue Lyra Review”, “One title reviews”, ‘The Cannon’s Mouth’ (UK), ‘The missing slate’ (UK), ‘The Midnight Diner’ (USA), ‘Poetica’ (USA), ‘Time of Singing’ (USA), "Canto" (USA), ‘Enhance’ (USA) “Ann Arbor Review” (USA) ‘The French Literary Review” (UK), “SpeedPoets” (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), “LUMMOX Poetry Anthology 3” (USA), “Erbacce” (UK), "fourW twenty-five Anthology" (Booranga Writers' Centre, Australia), “Poetry Super Highway” (USA) and “Knot Magazine” (USA). She also has works in forthcoming issues of “Poetica”, “Otter”, “The Journal” and in the Anthology by Mago Books.
Alisa Velaj has been shortlisted of the annual international erbacce-press poetry award in June 2014. She is also shortlisted in the Aquillrelle Publishing Contest 3 in January 2015. Her poems are translated into English by Ukë Buçpapaj.