Aleš Šteger

Aleš Šteger Poems

1.

Not a day passes without you thinking
How they've walled you too out of the world.
They've taken your perspective. Banished you.
...

When you close your eyes you see a poem.
It is emptied of the firmness of all things you secretly desire.
It reminds you of a white room freshly painted
Where summer forgot to close the windows and doors.
...

Even now you peddle the story of the Turks
At the gates of Vienna, dismantling their tents only as a ruse.
And how masquerading as kebab vendors
...

Silent eruptions of ions. Energy suspended in signs.
Antigravity. Magnetism's dance in bone swellings.

Protuberances.
...

5.

No one hears what the stone holds in.
Insignificant, all its own, an affliction
Caught between the foot's sole and the shoe.
...

6.

When you kill it at the edge of the pan, you don't notice
That the egg grows an eye in death.
It is so small, it doesn't satisfy
Even the most modest morning appetite.
...

You have remained empty-handed and you have a walnut in your hands.
At first you squeeze it and hide it like some magic,
But then everything squeezes you and you know that you must
...

There's only five minutes left to you
Before I put out the lights.
Because the poem for which you waited all day
Isn't there, simply enumerate what is.
...

9.

Mintafiction, minthane, mintabolism.
There the smell of mint grows out of bone,
Out of a neighbor's thumb and a stranger's shin.
No animal could do it, it's not worth repeating.
...

Who speaks when you are not speaking in your own name?
When you do not pretend to speak in the name of another,
But there is the presence of a voice like the ghost's at a séance?
Just retro larifari, cadabra abra, aha, aha, blah blah?
...

The word end
At all ends
And places
So you
Become more and more
...

Aleš Šteger Biography

Aleš Šteger (born 31 May 1973) is a Slovene poet, writer, editor and literary critic. His poetry has been translated into numerous languages and published in over two hundred literary journals and magazines internationally. Šteger was born in Ptuj in the Lower Styria region in eastern Slovenia in 1973, then part of Yugoslavia. He studied Comparative literature and German at University of Ljubljana. He has published five volumes of poetry, a travelogue of his experiences on a journey through Peru and two books of short stories. His books and poems have won several awards and been translated into English, German, Slovak, Croatian, Czech, Spanish, Bosnian, Serbian, Lithuanian, and Italian. He lives in Ljubljana and works as an editor at the Študentska založba publishing house. Among his editorial work, the most noticeable is a new revisited collection of poems by Edvard Kocbek published in 2004, which includes a number of Kocbek's unpublished poems as well as an insightful essay on Kocbek's poetic language written by Šteger. In 1998 Šteger won the Veronika Award for his poetry collection Kašmir and in 2008 he won the Rožanc Award, the highest prize for essays written in Slovene language.)

The Best Poem Of Aleš Šteger

Wall

Not a day passes without you thinking
How they've walled you too out of the world.
They've taken your perspective. Banished you.

Not a morning passes that you don't vow
To dismantle this wall today, and not a night
You don't come home dismantled. Resistance is meaningless.

No one is there to give you the safety of contraposition.
The bricks shift apart, soft as the hours,
Letting you step through before your palm can touch them.

Although there is no other side, no elsewhere.
Nowhere do you arrive, and nowhere nothing keeps you.
You have no wall where any of this might end.

And your wall is nowhere nobody never.

Translated by W. Martin and the author

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