Mental Asylum With Open Doors Poem by Mimoza Ahmeti

You are going, you are leaving us,
Thinking it's 'forever.'
Fleeing from this, which is yours, ours,
Which is our mental asylum,
Our beloved, moving asylum
With skulls dismembered.

Oh, my sacred madmen,
How I love you,
Though I never speak to you,
Though you never speak to me
And I cannot stand you
And you cannot stand me.
But such are the rites:
We never look each other in the eye
Without hating one another,
And such is the motive
For loving one another mad,
While smiling in exaltation,
And all the while
Tears flow down our cheeks
Tears.
Fellow sufferers
Of our unique madness,
You who are setting off into exile,
With eyes fixed
On one sole idea,
Oh, only on one sole idea,
Which has never been seen, never been found
And I doubt if it ever will be found.

Be off, depart, disappear.
From place to place, from country to country...
Oh, what shrieking echoes
Out of our asylum
As the sun sets late in the west,
When longing lingers for its children in the West...

What sorrow!
Bare walls... Walls which always
block the horizon
And leave an infinite sky above.

There, after midnight, the sobbing subsides,
Someone is talking to himself:
Nonetheless, the Albanians
Wherever they may be,
Make do with their own madness...