Also available in: Macedonian
If There Isn’t Enough Light for You
If there isn’t enough light for you,
take me.
That I may be night, a night that burns away
to bring you day.
And if there isn’t enough love for you,
take me.
I will dig out the pupils in the eyes of the night
that you mirror a star and shine.
If there isn’t enough hate for you,
even then, take me.
Hell is weaving beneath my heart
a hell for all eternity.
If there isn’t enough light for you,
take me.
But if there isn’t enough me for you,
what am I to you?
Except that I gaze at you endlessly,
except that I burn away.
"Šopov was fully aware of his responsibility as a modern Macedonian poet, crafting richly textured, complex poems in a once-suppressed language for a people whose national identity had itself only recently been officially recognized. Something of this is expressed in the poem “If There Isn’t Enough Light for You”.
Read alone, it sounds like a touching love poem, a lover’s promise to do all he can to comfort and console his beloved. But when we read it in the context in which it appears in Reader of the Ashes, coming immediately after the “Lament from the Other Side of Life” and surrounded by other poems written in response to the devastation of the Skopje earthquake, we hear the poet expressing his love to his grieving nation, promising to use all his abilities to assuage their unfathomable sorrow.
The love is reciprocal".
Excerpt from "The Fire Is Here: The Long Journey of Aco Šopov" by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer
Aco Šopov, The Long Coming of the Fire, Deep Vellum, 2023.
Translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer and Rawley Grau.
The poem was also published in the journal Asymptote.
"Nightfall" and "If There Isn't Enough Light For You" recorded at Heliconian Hall, Toronto, February 14th, 2025.
Music by Michael Spiroff
Anaïs Kelsey-Verdecchia (soprano soloist), Christopher Bagan (piano), Andrew Downing (double bass), Alison Beckwith (soprano), Anika Venkatesh (alto), Larry Beckwith (tenor), Dion Mazerolle (bass).