We have been raised by altar bread.
Our childhood was grapevines for us
on which the young wine was ripening on our sky.
We grew up in a time
when we could buy fresh chickpea bread
or we could visit the ivied summer cinema at night
We watched Tornatore’s movies
and we were kids with the kids from the movie.
We didn’t know what fascism is,
we thought communism will last forever,
and we loved to play mobsters.
Our most favourite scene of all
was when we were staffing the fat Ollie’s mouth
with hunks of white socialist bread,
and he wasn’t complaining about it, because he was always hungry.
On the summer provincial movie screen,
America was Marilyn Monroe for us –
Marilyn Monroe rising up into the Statue of Liberty.
Under the wind of her little dress,
she was revealing to us the colonisation,
Mad Horse, Sitting Bull as he is acting himself
and swearing in the circus that rises up to her panties
in which there is no place
for the children of Cheyenne raised by their mothers
so they could be killed as little shooting targets in the air.
There wasn’t a place for the civil war, too,
nor for the prohibition, and
the gangsters with automats,
but there was a place for Chaplin’s toothbrush moustaches
and his two fingers with which
he blocks his ears
to prevent the lion from awakening,
for Buster Keaton’s frozen face
and the house that spins the storm,
and he can’t get through the door in any way,
and for Orson Welles’ Martians
with which he performed radio invasion
with the same fear as the fear of Cold War.
There is no place in Monroe’s panties
for the helicopters’ Flight of the Bumblebee in the
apocalypse of napalm,
nor for the underground hаngаrs with intercontinental rockets,
but there is a place for the Jedis from Star Wars
that hold the torch of liberty with their thoughts
in the middle of the darkness of the universe.
We have been raised by altar bread,
we have become democrats, too,
and we have spent nine cat lives
so we could survive,
but no one wants to remember the death between them.
I was left only with the memories
when my grandfather Carlo, the emigrant,
returned from America with a black limousine
and a blond girl,
Marilyn Monroe he said she was,
and we were just kids,
so we believed him without any questioning,
because we recognized her for her panties
when we stumbled on purpose and fell under her little dress.
Translation from Macedonian into English by prof. dr. Daniela Andonovska Trajkovska
Borče Panov was born on September 27, 1961 in Radovish, The Republic of North Macedonia. He has been a member of the “Macedonian Writers’ Association” since 1998. His poetry was published in a number of anthologies, literary magazines and journals both at home and abroad, and his works are translated into more than 40 languages: English, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, French, Catalonian, Mongolian, Uzbek, Albanian, Romanian, Polish, Italian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Danish language etc.
Panov works as a Counselor for Culture and Education at the Municipality of Radovish, and he is also an Arts Coordinator for the “International Karamanov’s Poetry Festival”, held in Radovish annually (the first edition of the festival was in 1967).
He has won several literary awards such as: Premio Mondiale "Tulliola- Renato Filippelli" in Italy for his book “Balloon Shaving” (2021), International Award of Excellence "City of Galateo-Antonio De Ferrariis" (Italy, Rome, 2021), Premio "Le Occasioni" in Italy (among 662 participants), Sahitto Literary Award 2021 (the first awarded among several distinguished and renowned authors who have received important literary awards such as Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize), and “PredragMatvejevic” in Croatia for his book “Balloon Shaving” in 2021 for the best book published 2018-2020.