History Class.

Lleshanaku, Luljeta

 The front row desks were always empty. I never understood why.
Second row was all smacking lips of those who recited lessons by heart.
 In the middle, were the timid ones who took notes and stole the
occasional chalk. And in the last row, young boys craning their heads
toward beauty marks on the necks of blond girls.
I don't remember the teacher's name, the lab, or the names of
the portraits on the wall, except the orthopedic irony clinging to his
stumped arm like foam at the Cape of Good Hope.
When his healthy arm would point out Bismarck, the hollow sleeve looked
in an unknown direction. We couldn't tell which of us was the
target, which not, questioning this way even that minimal identity we
already thought we owned.
From his insatiable mouth flew out battle dates, names, causes. Never
resolutions, nor winners, because we could hardly wait for the bell to
write our own history those days when we knew roughly everything.
But sometimes, his hollow sleeve was warm and human like a
cricket-filled summer night waiting to land somewhere. On a valley or
roof. It searched for a hero among us, not among the athletic or
sparkly-eyed ones, but among those "stained" with innocence.
One day, each one of us will be that teacher in front of a
seventeen-year-old boy or girl with a beauty
    mark on her neck. And the desks on the front row will remain empty,
suspicious like the stumped arm of history which makes the other arm
appear omnipotent. 

Translations from the Albanian By Ani Gjika

Visit the WLT website to hear the author read "History Class" in Albanian and to read "Negative Space," an additional poem.

Winner of the Albanian National Silver Pen Prize in 2000 and the International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, Luljeta Lleshanaku is the author of six poetry books in Albanian and three in English: Fresco: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002), Child of Nature (New Directions, 2010), and Haywire: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a finalist for the 2013 Popescu Prize.

An Albanian American poet and translator, Ani Gjika is author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). Her work appears in AGNI Online, Seneca Review, Salamander, Fishousepoems .org, and elsewhere.