Turning Back Poem by Sami Gjoka

There was only rain above,
And only mud was below.
I had flown like a dove
To land like a scary crow.

Inside me I saw the cosmos
Transformed in a dusty storm
Dreams of building our shelter,
Dreams of building our home
Shook like it could not stop shaking,
Till the dream was dream no more

I thought it must be the landing
In this narrow airport
Or perhaps I came too early,
Or should I’ve come at all?

I stood trembling, I stood aching
Praying you would not see me,
Turning like a sinking boat
From the cliff back to the sea.

Dreams of change are dead of course
Hopes, injected with poison.

Looking as cavemen to me
Thinking now—they were free,
Boys had covered lips and faces—
With beards and with mustaches,
They were breaking, they were burning
Whatever they could see,
In their gallop to Europe.

Girls had left the streets deserted
Filled with such graveyard silences
For the slithering remorse.

Crowds that swiped the towns, chanting death to dying masters
Left behind the city squares, filled with falling, broken glasses,
Disappointed, and betrayed, mocked, laughed at once again
By the masters that had changed, just the tables, just the chairs,
They were slowly disappearing in the dark and in the rain
To their plumbless, ill-designed, uniformly built houses.

There I stood a million years, looking at my troubled land
Faces of my countrymen filled with ancient, awful rage
In the air one would smell—burnings of the fields of grains
While on the other hand, crowds screamed and begged for help,
To fight hunger.

I felt like a trunk of tree, not a leaf in me was left
While joy of my return suffered such a sadly death.

Behind me, cars were falling
From the bridges. All the deaths
Were blamed upon the farmers,
That flew plows in the dirt,
That let bushes take the earth,
Riding cars that were brought
By our many, many thefts;
Cars that spread across Albania
The pollution of the West.

I can’t breathe in all this smog
I’ll be tumor in your long
If I do not run away!

And I prayed that you would never see me or hear of me,
That I came to build a house that we dreamed by the sea,
While turning, going back.