Lament from the Other Side of Life

I climbed above the summit of the pain.
I am a human. But what is a human?
Emptiness before me, emptiness behind me.
Emptiness that catches fire.

From the other side of life,
with strong knots crucified alive,
I climbed above the summit of the pain.
That day. Blackday. Up black stairs.

I climbed above the summit from the pain.
From the other side of life,
from the other side of myself,
of everything not spoken,
everything not burned away,
from the other side of the water,
from the other side of the wellspring,
from the other side of the root.

Dissolve, clump of clay, flow out, water,
overflow, cup of keening,
for all the cities of this city,
all the grievings of this grieving.
Tell me who to blame,
who to feel sorry for? Tell me!
O child who is no more—
my grieving, your embrace.

My grieving, your embrace,
your darkness, my underworld.
O earth of keening, earth of desert,
from dead weeping grown,
earth, look around, earth, uncover yourself.

Take this eye,
take this wheat
in your withered hand.

Take me, earth, or bring me back,
bring me back below this summit,
below the other side of life,
return my human powers to me.
O earth, bring me back to earth.
I am a human, meant as a human to suffer;
to find stone, to wall myself up alive
in some arch on some bridge.

Aco Šopov, Reader of the Ashes (Гледач во пепелта), 1970
The poem was inspired by the Skopje earthquake in July 1963.
Translated by Rawley Grau and Christina Kramer, 2022

Read also “At Five-Seventeen“