It’s getting dark, and in the west someone’s foot
Has knocked over a jug of wine, pouring it all over the horizon.
The new moon looks like horns on a helmet in which,
in films, Moses is shown. Pines smell
of a mixture of lemons and incense

A soldier, long and brittle like a rye stalk, is doing sentry duty.
He’s brittle with youth and love. Carefully he pulls out of his breast pocket
a girl’s white blouse. And he plunges his face in it.
He drinks its scent for a long time. Those five or six grams of fabric
he could pull through a wedding ring

A sight divinely unutterable. Saying it in words
would be like measuring the Lose Weight Exercise
of a sun’s ray on a scale.
Suddenly, from all this—from the wine-colored west
from the new moon with horns, from the girl’s blouse,
whose scent can, like a thread, lead you out of hell—
suddenly, from all this, I feel relieved in my soul.

And in the world

You know that war still exists on earth
like a black ball of yarn. But the soul could
play with it like a kitten. Death still shows through everything.
Yet not like a skull showing through the skin of the face
But like a seed through a grape:
making it more magical

Translated by Omer Hadžiselimović – ©2006 Omer Hadžiselimović

The preceding text is copyright of the author and/or translator and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.