TRANSLATED FROM THE SERBIAN BY MARIJA BERGAM PELLICANI
Image used for Representation
Ab initio
Many doors inside me
Squeak and slam in the wind
So old and senile
It doesn´t even remember the burglars
But sometimes, from afar,
It brings the sounds of their
Songs of triumph
It assembles echoes in empty halls
Like brash and savage children
Mumbling in despair: who are you
Who let you in
Agon
My verse is a young Aryan
In love with the rabbi’s daughter.
It believes in the ideology of supra-language,
But knows that the road is older than the wheel.
Some thoughts I hide from it.
It peers into my contracts with metaphors.
Once I drove through some fields
Watching the idle scarecrows.
The chosen people of birds
Looked as if it had defected into the promised land,
Leaving the old world behind.
The old world is a scarecrow laid
On a heap of kindling behind a village shack –
That’s what I thought.
There’s a hen, said my verse.
It’s settling to lay an egg
Into that straw head.
Once Seen
It had been raining all day
History was cooling on bronze heads
Doormen were squinting like mystics
Through the clouded windowpanes of the institutions
It wasn´t easy shaking the feeling
That time was asking for something in return
The street geometry was folding into
The meaninglessness of the observer´s hurry
The secret of knowledge descended among taxi drivers
The speech withdrawn into its half-deaf chapels
The branches – crossed in the gusts
As if a plant crusade were about to begin
For a moment the world was a keyhole
On the heavy door behind which someone is alone
I saw this one Thursday
Taking my old headache for a walk
And wished poetry were possible
Travelogue
How naïf of me
To bring out among people
A hoop of smoke and a fistful
Of bitter dust.
Children were eating a watermelon
At the feet of a totem,
A dog was licking its wound
Under a classical quotation.
Dampness on the walls
Of the academies and a woman
By a window open
Onto the world before speech.
Knowledge of honey and metaphysics,
And a theology based
On this proportion: one jewel
For one pocket darkness.
Evening chores
Neglected, so one could see
How love jumps over
Its own shadow and goes off,
Followed by bees,
Which remember the flowers
Sprouted from horse carcasses
In the field after a battle.
Stateless
You should go forth among the people
And see how your loneliness
Lives on the faces of others
The cultivated lady in front of a billboard
For the theatrical premiere
The old man who stopped to read the obituaries
The local simpleton sitting
Under the bust of The Liberator
Heckling girls
The mustachioed employee of Water Utilities
Half-visible in a manhole’s yawn
The postman – Sysiphus‘ cousin
Sysiphus’ darkened face
In The History of Art bought
From a street vendor
The earnest thin-lipped clerk
Lucida intervalla in a boy’s gaze
And his young time of yearning
All those faces are home to your
By-now-demented loneliness
Resigned to a life in a foreign land
Ask of it to come back to you
And dip its tongue heavy with silence
Into your empty words
Behind
Through clouded windowpanes
The view of the world is no more
But the desire for clarity
Marking something down with your finger
Across the dampness on the pane
An easy thought or a line of poetry
Briefly peering
Through the letter keyholes
With the ardour of a spy and a saint
Just close enough to the words
For your own breath to take away
A bit of the world
Also, read Someone Else’s Cinderella by Sonja Veselinović, translated from the Serbian by Marija Bergam Pellicani, and published in The Antonym:
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