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Rip Bulkeley

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The Malsia Gjakovs *

Tearing out of the Damnation Range
the rocky waters of the Erenik
sweep past a garden outside Glakova
where a starving cat returns
reluctantly
to the silent, blossom-covered
hand of a poet.

A few painted metal yard-doors
along from the Freedom Hotel
(10 rooms, very simple, no en suite),
at the house with two fig trees
which is no longer a house,
a soldier weeps from indirect remorse
when he looks at the paper he is using
and recognizes verse he cannot read.

He suddenly knows that the children
of a truth-loving girl in Novi Sad
will not be his children.

The exterminated poem
can be tracked across
our global cloud-chamber
and roughly deciphered.

It recalls how for centuries
the five tribes of the district
never let two religions
divide their canny guerrilla
against every thrust of Turkish rule.

Its unwritten ending
would have been adapted
from a traditional song
which embroiders a filigree
of lamentation for
the Malsia Gjakovs
who will never muster again.

 

* The Malsia Gjakovs (“Mountain Blood-kin”) were a group of five Albanian tribes, three Moslem and two Roman Catholic, living around the small town of Gjakova (Djakovica in Serbo-Croatian) in north-west Kosovo. According to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published just before the overthrow of the Turkish Empire, the Gjakovs were never disarmed by the Turks and never paid them any taxes. (The historical facts, especially of the 1881 uprising of the Kosovar Albanians, are slightly more complicated, but such are not what songs are made of.) Before its recent destruction, Gjakova (pop. about 23,000) was a centre of modern Albanian culture, with a thriving artists’ and writers’ colony.


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