Elegiac Crystals Poem by Borce Panov

My grandpa used to call me 'Root, '
for whenever they tried to pull me out
from my children's sleep before the dawn - to plant tobacco,

I used to hang onto my childhood as mulberry's root.
And before the dew became cold between our fingers
I found myself in a golden dawn bay

watching little Ignacio *, who, like a hungry dove,
was hovering over St. Mark's Square
through the reflection of the blue with a black gondola as background,

that my father brought to me one morning,
instead of dawn on his tired face
from the night shift at the mine -

And when he brought those wondrous crystals,
my day turned into a crystal's mine
in which I still keep the crystals of my life -

Crystals of breath and sigh
between which our sun was always different
and expanding our small apartment

with rooms of scarcity and bedroom crumpled as a sad letter -
into rooms of prisms that I turned to the east
in order to grow and breathe with light.

There was a room with my mother sitting there, quietly, watching the mirror
seeing in it all that she has already seen,
without the sweet nectar of her wounds

for they already healed with white dawns of hope-
embroiding her embroider with breaths and sighs
and with an invisible threads of comfort...

There was one room with silk beetles there
in front of which my grandma with her clenched lips
and held tact of her heart tout me
how to listen to the silent silk thread,

by telling me how just a little breath of darkness
can stop the transformation of sighs -
like when it happend one night when moth-fire

broke all the strings of our old house,
and white flame, like the white ashes, was left to me in remembrance,
and in the roots of my elegiac crystals,

which are still pouring the silk from the lips of my grandma
and I am still hanging onto my root,
and among the fruits of mulberry voraciously browsing words

and growing with the quiet crystal's network
awakened for each voice that touched me from afar,
and flaming with a butterfly of pronounced...