SLAVKO JANEVSKI
b. 1920

Born in Skopje. Studied at the College of Technology. Member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Writes poetry, short stories and novels: several volumes of each genere. Has been translated into Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Romanian, Czech, Italian, Russian, English, Hungarian, Albanian, Turkish, German, French, Polish and Esperanto. Winner of several prizes.

PASTEL

There the hungry wolf
with his teeth
has ripped out the hot entrails.

There the fugitive convict
stone by stone
has dug his grave.

There the naked dead
on a table of their bones
have chopped up the moon.

There the rutting stags,
their antlers entangled,
have turned into skeletons.

There on hard arid ground
sorcerers have woven
a wedding feast banner from their veins.

The groom is the wind,
the bride is the mist.

Amazingly in their cradle
(a handful of earth and hope)
a nameless flower opens.

Let's go and name it:
let it be called Dream.

LOOKING FOR AN ANSWER

It left his skin on a stone
and turned into stone. A viper.

It grunted from rifle shots
and turned into mist. A wild boar.

It washed its eyes in foam
and turned into a sigh. Day.

In the village of Vrazi Dol
Old father Time has sat down on a stone
and on his fingers
of wisdom
calculates
how many drops of blackberry wine are needed
to prolong his life.

You can ask yourself and still you won't know:
Does time die with man?

MARKINGS

This race,
this wonderful race!

Here it kisses the hangman
with a golden noose round its neck;
here for a fistful of mulberries
it fights to the blood with a brother;
here it gets drunk with rage,
foaming at the mouth,
here it plucks the live heart
from a dove.

This race,
this wonderful race!

In its furrows
under the sun awakens
a flower with a biblical name:
Mother-of-God's-heart.

BREAKFAST WITH DEATH

He doesn't come the way you thought
from rose-coloured glaciers
with a dead stag in his arms.

Quietly he creeps out of
the sunflowers' sparks,
his eyes are golden,
his hands those of a ploughman.

We meet like friends
on an ant's trail:
Death with a primrose in his teeth,
you with a cake under your arm.

The primrose of salamader skin
the cake of sweat and sand.

He with primrose wine
you with a mouthful of cake,
both in the jaws of time.

As you lay down together
on a bed of nettles
Death's nine larks
began a lullaby.

And the warm breezes too
fell asleep under the stone.