The contribution of partizanke, or female partisan fighters, to the Yugoslav liberation war was unprecedented in occupied Europe: official statistics of the socialist period report 100,000 women fighting as partisans, and two million participating in various ways to the support of the National Liberation Movement. Approximately 25,000 women died in battle, 40,000 were wounded, and 2,000 of them acquired […]
First publication Why does the white mouse grant luck? I have found out. And I’ll tell you. When you are born, life deals you a hand. Better or worse. You are born a healthy or sick baby, small or large, rich or poor, white or a bit darker. That’s how it works. If your parents are wealthy or at least […]
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 […]
Health-giving sounds of wind and waves with a lovely view of Lake Ontario and the nuclear plant in Oswego. In the distance it looks like a steamboat that leaves behind its smoke signals that imperceptibly merge into the herd of clouds. I lie motionless, highly productive. Excellent working conditions in deep shade; beneath the spreading branches of a maple, I […]
“Nowhere else than in America do they pay so well for reading poems.” wrote Miłosz in his poem “Texas.” The next line, “Next to my signature I put the date 2000.” scarcely seems needed since the first one sounds so timeless. Yet my modest experience doesn’t fit that, and I’m unsure what “the Poor B.B.” would have said, while the […]
Everything is just like this photograph — cloudy. Fogs are frequent here, pictures fogged up. Before my impressions take shape, and words fit together, the fog lifts and broadens my horizons. Everything is just like this photograph, only one doesn’t hear the flapping of wings of the flock that flies away past the lens. But the sound has slipped under […]