Miradie Zymberi Avdullahi: Frozen Tear of a Migrant Woman

I am far from you, O ancient land,

My heart is broken, it has become a charred heap of longing.

For you I gave my youth and everything I had,

You are the only thing I leave as a legacy to my daughter and son,

Let them not forget Skanderbeg,

nor the war of Adem Jashari.

This frozen tear of mine is a gift to you.

Furrows and furrows make wrinkles on my forehead,

Like the long roads where I crashed into a foreign land.

When I remember my homeland with longing.

Home is where my child finds comfort

This longing that burns me is an old debt,

Like childhood bread that I am paying back with blood.

Because it was made with seven loaves, how can I cook anything else.

My knees ache, but my soul does not give up.

Don't be burdened, son, by my dry words,

Don't worry about an old woman who is getting old,

Go to the house with old stairs.

Where the tears of the mud still drown and torment the stones.

Where the walls remember the source of the horror,

Where we learned Albanian with light under our eyelids,

Don't bow down before the first demands of any despair.

Keep Kosovo in blood, as the only one alive.

Open the windows a little, so that the mountain breeze can enter,

Because this sacrifice must not go to waste.

I am a wanderer, a shadow that follows you,

But I have left my roots there, where the earth still groans.

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