Where After the Last Poetry of Ante?

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Where After the Last Poetry of Ante?

Poetry that has the strength and right to get directly involved in your lives, more than a mother, more than a benevolent parent or a wise old woman, more than the closest, it is not only the supreme wise one, but it is also the most needed “house” in which we should “enter”. There, they will calm us down and comfort us that:

Truly, life was maybe not good
But is was beautiful…

What do we do with this sentence? Can it be everybody’s? Can we agree that although “it was not good” to us personally, it is nevertheless… irresistibly beautiful.
Even if we are 90 years old, this sentence “it was beautiful” still wishes that it was not in the past tense. Here, on this spot of “thickened awareness”, the idea of a beautiful life starts to grow. And we understand that in the meantime we have only “prepared” for this general, someone’s “beautiful life”.
But, the paradox returns as a boomerang. Maybe for the others, our “poor”, “bad” life is their imagined, “beautiful life”. Do we grieve for other “beautiful” lives, and we live our own “bad” ones?
Most often yes. For “other’s” yard is somehow more beautiful than ours, ours is neglected.
Or have we imagined that ours is the most beautiful, and then we are blind that our neighbor does not need a yard at all.
Do we speak of “happiness”, “beautiful life”, more precisely of the idea or the “commercial” of a so-called “beautiful life”?
This is how Ante sets the issues. First, he advises us and teaches us to be open to ourselves:

This light that teaches
how to speak with ourselves
most honestly, (161)

and then:

It all depends on the honesty
with which you speak to yourself
and the readiness
to understand yourself as a stone… (16)

The degree of “honesty”,
I would say greatness, and even the “age of honesty”, which we have (or do not have) is the best approach to knowledge on the evaluation of: quality of life, and even everything else. When, how shall we face it? In our old age, shall we say: “life was like this”, or sooner, shall we decide to be “directors”, “architects”, “pilots”, “bosses” or our own life. No matter how much we love it or accept it. If we first accept it or agree, at least in our face, then we shall accept it easier; our voice, our verse, our wishes, our illusions, and then the ones of the others too.
That is how Ante “entered” all of us, he stayed in all of those to whom he dedicated or did not dedicate a poem, that is how he wanted to “get out of” us, and to calm us:

It is not very difficult
to become a stone; freestone and marble,
even. It all depends on the honesty
to yourself, the truthfulness
with which you accept or not
the truth that surrounds you, which has
big, open eyes that can see
on the other side. When it happens,
you can say: you are a stone,
the world grows on your ruins as well… (162)

When those who love us die before us, they scare us, as if preparing a softer, warmer ”field” which awaits us when we join them. They go before us, as if in “cold water”. So Ante, who “buried the fear” by a poem, asked it to help us, to be with us, when it is the most difficult. His poem. His silences and nonsilences.

* * *

Now I too have the right to ask: Where after Ante Popovski’s poetry? Where after the newest distressing truth or honesty? Because, according to him:

The word has big eyes, he thought
It watches far behind… (202)

And in another poem the word is a “soul of the soul”:

Because the word is a way out
Of the dark forgetfulness of the matter
And a souls of the soul. (213)

Where
after this poetry?
Ante said in the last verses:

Just a while longer and I shall return home… (137)

And he also said how, in another poem:

Here I am, I rose and I set in the word… (191)

He also said how it will happen:

(…) Over there,
we shall go to bed alone,
for we only gave the life
something of our own,
while we gave death everything… (61)

In Две тишини the poet said good-bye to all, and he said good-bye to himself, with the dearest that he had – the word. He did it with the poem He Went to Bed with the Word:

He is not here,
he left.

(…)

He chose a poignant chamber
and he went to bed with his word
now nobody knows
if he is silent or dreaming.

He is not here,
he left. (192)

* * *

Where after Ante’s last poetry?

* * *

Today we “entered” it together, and we will have to “exit” alone.
Today, we shall all be quiet in the same silence, we shall take it to our homes.

* * *

In the end, I want to publicly thank Macedonia for giving us Ante, and also to get angry to death for taking him from us

Translated by: Elizabeta Bakovska

2018-08-21T17:23:02+00:00 July 3rd, 2008|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 60|0 Comments