We come from a land of misfortune where literature, art and music are not needed Apart from woeful folk poetry, now and then a verse like an anemic decoration for national tyrants So our poems do not have the expected charm nor attractiveness, nor spleen. Not even the sound of melancholy from the rain drumming on the roof We have […]
The planet that has lost its soul and mind Writes about its end, which is to be On December 21, 2012. But that, unfortunately, will not happen. Yet still, this world must end sometime When all people will disappear in fire or ice, All living things, animals and plants And there won’t be any Noah’s Ark. All books will turn […]
Never say things can’t be worse They can Never say things were never worse They were If people didn’t reach the peak of the hill they touched the bottom of the abyss Where what has befallen you is a bagatelle Chocolate calls for raspberries pick them The homeland calls for sons bear them Your lover longs for shackles forge them […]
In the Liberation obituaries I find that F. has died. She was the prettiest girl at the Sarajevo Philosophy Faculty, Class of 1974. My roommate in the student dorm Drank day and night because of her, but she once told me “I like you better.” There was no love between us. I caressed her once on a shaded bench on […]
The end of the world is happening every day, every evening and morning The four riders of the apocalypse are thundering over our heads. Do you hear them? Gliding from Bosnia to Rwanda, Afghanistan, they gallop to Iraq and Libya The first horseman, on a white horse, the conqueror, seduces people, drives them mad The second rider is on a […]
“O rose, pure contradiction…“, Rilke Zlatko Ugljen, a professor, threefold academic, master artist in our modern times, and creator of unfaltering architecture is turning eighty. Zlatko was born in the city of Mostar, to which he donated his most beautiful buildings, artistic pious endowments now leveled to the ground. Today oblivion is flourishing in our devastated cities, and its ugly, […]
My Jesus protect us from those who protect you defend us from those who defend you those who protect you from the men in despair who blaspheme your name the young men similar to you protect us from those who protect you because their words ring with the clanking of gold coins while they auction off your passion, while pitying […]
The girls of my youth, nausicaas The girls of my youth, dianas, danaias, lolitas they are only in their forties, but they are already gray haired, creased foreheads, wrinkled hands those “ladylike ones behind the sewing machines” Many of them are already toughened, have already forgotten love as a foreign language is forgotten. The girls of my youth, ruths and […]
If I were to be born again and could choose, I would choose neither this language, nor this vocation Neither this sign of faith, nor this faith without hope. I would not accept murderers teaching me justice. I would not pick this time nor this country where there is no solace. Nor these brothers who have sold me. Nor this […]