Mujë Buçpapaj
If you know what it feels like to be home, Mujë Buçpapaj’s The Invisible Victory will break your heart. It is a beautiful, intimate portrait of a people and a landscape torn by war—and of the scars that remain. Buçpapaj becomes the haunting voice of multitudes, both living and dead, who experienced the war in Kosovo, and he focuses on the connection between the men, women and children and their homeland. The poems that constitute The Invisible Victory are the jagged, glittering fragments of the poet’s heart lying raw and scattered between nations. The human spirit is what unifies the poems—the longing for home as it once was and for people who are now lost—and the utter sadness in knowing it is only a memory. The brokenness reflects the hearts of the poet’s brothers and sisters—of friends, families, enemies, and what is human in each of us. All suffered together; they were and are unified in their pain, and pain and brokenness are part of what unifies The Invisible Victory.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY
Field of solitude remaining
Ripe corn
Sprouting from children’s hands
Sun falling in marsh
Writing in vapour
Blowing wind
The girl giving in
In tall grass
Shrouded only by shadow
Love coming
From begging
Unspoken victories
Do not exist
But Harvesting
Is in forgetting waters
Life
Not enough
For Men
For Men
To do good
THE WIND’S PORTRAIT
Colour of Northern storm
River winds portrait
Into standing trees
Man built
The other side of life and river
Between rain and field
But wind will have its say
Village’s messages
Distant mountains
Receiving flying bird
From marshes
Dreams fleeing
Village’s sad face
Losing forever the way
Leading
To the trembling of the Populars
Season of my home
Winds winding reminding
We are found again
