REMEMBERING THE POET / The death of Lasgush Poradeci, the slowing of a step that comes to a halt, the fading of a star that bursts into the brilliance of longing

He, Lasgush Poradeci, has for many years no longer belonged to the living of this world. Yet his poetry, the pure, singing soul of a heart full of longing, continues to caress the waves of Pogradec’s wistful lake, that serene aspiration which slept in the poet’s dream and awoke in the sweetness of his verses and the alluring gleam of his watery eyes and restless heart.

Then came that November day, to announce a passing and silence a fiery voice, embracing mortality as a call toward another dimension, as a leap into another resonance of eternal experience. The word rose upon the threshold, frozen on his lips, molded into the bounds of eternity, out there among the constellations, where his spirit shaped with word and verse the timelessness of a heart that measures the universe with the steps of feeling, with trembling strides of bodies breathing in the air of memory like birds.

On November 12, 1987, that day of veiled flame and trembling waves prepared for the final point of a soul’s flight, a spirit that wandered through fires and sang with desires, stretching its sorrow in streams of tears and burning pain. Messengers came with the wind, lingering in the ether with their silent steps.

Lasgushi had died, that tender rest of longing and remembrance had given its hand to melancholy.

That mourning became a messenger itself, dripping through the clouds, traveling with the cold air, and echoing in the frosted steps of that dark awakening, that yearning which weakens and saddens, that message which comes with the halting of breath in a chest once filled with divine poetry and feeling.

Thus the poet faded away 35 years ago. The heavens were angry and gray with sorrow; the fiery chest had ceased to throb at the age of 88. The song was silenced, the chirping stopped, the lyricist of the lake’s waves, the eternal lover of passionate adventures, was gone.

The death of Lasgush Poradeci was the stopping of time. The death of Poradeci was the death of a poet, the extinguishing of a star, an event in the galaxy of the soul of the world, which was felt in every breath and every yearning.

“KORÇA BOOM”