By Edjona Dervishi
With the poetry collection “Eci zbathur mbi prush” (“Walking Barefoot on Embers”), recently released by Botimet Pegi, Gjergj Zefi invites us on a journey through myth, love and memory, where time does not manage to extinguish everything, and where lived experiences continue to smolder in silence…
There are things that time erases from memory, just as there are others it makes more present as the years pass. Some experiences end the moment we live them; others continue inside us, taking on new meanings each time we return to them. Perhaps this is exactly where poetry begins: in that part of life that has passed, but has not yet ended within a person.
It is in this unclear space between what has happened and what remains that Gjergj Zefi’s poetry collection “Eci zbathur mbi prush” takes its place.
The title of the book suggests a direct experience of pain. To walk barefoot on embers means to face fire with nothing to protect you from it. But the ember also has another meaning: it is the fire that continues to burn after the flame has gone out. This double meaning may be one of the keys to the book.
Gjergj’s poetry seems to deal precisely with the anatomy of these silent fires: with what once burned us and what, in other forms, continues to live inside us.
Known for his work in journalism, Gjergj approaches poetry from an experience that, at first glance, seems distant from it. Journalism seeks the event, the fact, the testimony. Poetry often deals with what escapes all three: the memory of a feeling, the weight of an absence, the part of the truth that cannot be proven but that a person recognizes as their own.
In the introductory note to the book, the author writes: «I am not a poet. I am a journalist who writes poetry.»
This statement contains a paradox. A person who has spent a large part of his life observing the world feels, at one point, the need to look at what the world has left inside him.
Gjergj calls poetry «a kind of prophylaxis of the soul». The phrase connects to Nietzsche’s well-known warning about the abyss which, once you have gazed into it for long enough, begins to gaze back into you. For a journalist who constantly confronts power, violence, lies and broken human destinies, this relationship is not merely a philosophical figure.
Nevertheless, it would be limiting to read the book only through the author’s profession. Journalism may explain part of the impulse to write, but it does not explain the world that is created in poetry.
In Eci zbathur mbi prush, intimate experience intertwines with mythology, history and cultural memory. Ancient gods, biblical figures, cities and landscapes do not appear as displays of erudition. They become part of an attempt to give a broader dimension to what, at its core, remains deeply human.
Myth has a strange quality: it gives eternal names to experiences that each of us lives as unrepeatable. Love, jealousy, betrayal, desire and death have changed little since the time when people began to tell them through gods.
In this sense, the presence of mythology in Gjergji’s poetry creates a relationship between the temporal and the eternal. A woman’s body, an encounter, a separation or a memory can carry the echo of a story far older than the characters who live it.
This interweaving gives the book a dimension that goes beyond personal narrative. The contemporary person, with his loneliness and uncertainties, appears as the heir to the same questions that have troubled humanity for thousands of years.
Another constant presence in this poetry is time. Not calendar time, but the time that leaves its mark on the body, in relationships and in memory.
In the poem Gushti, the ripeness of nature and of the human body appears on the threshold of fading. Grapes, split figs, jasmine and a woman’s body create a landscape where beauty is inseparable from the awareness of its passing.
The poem closes with the lines:
Outside,
winter has come;
inside,
August is still burning.
In this simple opposition between winter and August lies one of the most sensitive ideas of the book: a person does not age equally in all parts of their being. The body submits to time, while memory and desire may continue to live according to another calendar.
In the poem The Woman of That Night, this relationship becomes even more visible. Memory does not remain only in the mind. It is preserved in the body, in a shiver that can awaken even when the years have changed everything else.
Whereas in Olives We Never Planted, the poem shifts toward another form of loss: that which never happened. The unplanted olive trees become a sign of a possible life, of a future that existed only in desire.
After all, a person carries not only the memory of what they have lived. They also carry the weight of what they did not dare to live.
Here the idea of the anatomy of fire takes on a deeper meaning. It is not only the pain of what we have lost, but also the presence of what we never had. Some absences have no event from which they were born. Yet they can accompany us throughout life.
The poem has the ability to give a kind of existence even to these absences. It does not change what happened, but it allows us to see that what did not happen may also have left its trace.
The title ‘Walking Barefoot on Embers’ thus suggests more than a confrontation with pain. It can also be read as a figure for writing itself: the attempt to pass through experiences that burn, without losing sensitivity.
The book concludes with the poem Kandili. From the ember of the title to the light of the lamp, a symbolic connection is created that can be read as a journey from the fire that burns to the light that is preserved.
In the beginning is the ember, the heat hidden under ash. At the end is the lamp, a small flame that does not aim to consume everything, but only to illuminate enough so as not to remain in darkness.
Between these two images one can also imagine the inner movement of the book: from experience that leaves a wound toward the effort to give it meaning.
In this journey, love, memory, mythology and the awareness of death do not offer final answers. They make more visible the question that lies behind them: what remains of a person after time has taken everything it can take?
In his introductory note, Gjergji draws a distinction between two ways of writing: journalism has taught him to seek the fact, while poetry seeks what remains after the facts fade.
Perhaps this distinction is also a key to reading ‘Walking Barefoot on Embers’.
Because facts belong to what has happened. Memory, desire and loss continue to act long afterward.
And sometimes, what remains of a life is not the event we can recount, but the trace it has left in us.
That trace is perhaps the most silent form of fire.