Blindness
       for Jorge Luis Borges

You will die one day, dear Jorge,
One night, all alone and forgotten!
Have you not felt condemned for years now,
For decades dreaming in the dark, bereft of your sight?
The Divine Comedy you read with your fingers,
You bathe in the dust of derelict cities,
Like string you lace memories and senses in knots,
Compelling the expanses of time to embrace.
You will die one night, dear Jorge,
One day, all alone and forgotten,
At the most you will be a speck of dust
Borne by the winds to the Arabian deserts.
Your labyrinth is the brainchild of solitude,
A trap which seizes misery by the throat.
Have you not felt for years now, poor Jorge,
Sentenced and doomed to dream in the dark?

[Verbimi, from the volume Leja e njohtimit, Prishtina: Rilindja, 1985, p. 90.
First published in English in An Elusive Eagle Soars, Anthology of Modern Albanian Poetry,
London: Forest Books 1993, p. 184. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]