That is not all. For decades I have been looking for a way to comfort myself, to find any kind of hope for the salvation of civilization. When I observe good people, I become an optimist and I write verses full of the sun and fragrances. When I observe those others, I sink, and then lift my head toward the sky, looking for someone who could help us. People are not only bloodthirsty. They are also intelligent, but very egoistic, merciless, revengeful, and unforgiving … Now the Serbs, because they lived for centuries under the Turkish Empire, have revenged themselves on the Bosnians. Serbs have been free for more than a hundred years. The Turkish Empire has become history. They revenged themselves on Bosnians for the misery they had endured, because as Muslims the Bosnians reminded them of Turks, and not of their brothers, Slavs. Perhaps those people who are today under the heel of Americans will one day revenge themselves on the future Americans. A crime once committed triggers a chain of crimes. Didn’t it start with Cain and Abel? The brother killed his brother out of pride and egoism. Then the Abels revenge themselves on Cains, then Cains on Abels. And so on forever, people have been killing each other. What powerful artistry did that creator-genius need to create man from infinitesimal and formless cells and molecules and to make him biologically and mentally so complex and so incapable of achieving peace?!
That is why I advocate cloning, but I would first give that right to extraterrestrials, provided I had firm proof that in their own civilization they do not kill each other. I would allow them to clone our future generations and to create beings who know of no hate or aggression.
While I was writing the verses of the poem “The Sun”, CNN was reporting that Americans, in the three years of the war in Iraq, had caused the death of more than 650 thousand Iraqis. In the next report, some Terry Smith from southern Texas was showing his horses to the reporters and explaining what he feeds them so that they win the race. Diet is the future of the world, he was saying, demonstrating a special horse diet. This is a diet against everything that prevents them from winning the race!
WAR
How could you say people deserve war!
Where did you get such a grotesque idea?!
Even when it is holy,
War destroys;
Humanity’s everlasting wound.
The truths about the enemy
Are being invented.
War follows a cholera in the mind,
Wrapped in the deceiving cloak of profit.
Human hands crush
The blossoming scents of spring.
In glasses of filthy rapture
The ashes become laurels,
Bloodstained badges
The symbols
In carriages of doubtful pride.
Spring birds arrive on the wings of hope.
Instead of nests
Ashes
And moaning streams.
A frozen mystery at the root.
If winners write history,
The truth is not true.
In war,
Happiness is the unhappiness
Of others.
TOMBSTONE
and this tombstone
like a gemstone
witnesses
the forlorn time
of old defiance and rage
the tombstone here
and the one nearby
make our eyes see
that we did not fall from the skies
that in this cloven land
lies the root
which makes us all kin
and the tombstone
in the tempest of time
murmurs
that something deep inside
us
and you
consoles
and man is born
from something
like a drop of water in the sea
IF I WERE THE WIND
Were I the wind to winnow far and wide,
Along lanes and over meadows,
Through woods and groves,
Into blooming flowers …
Perhaps I would find you,
My sturdy children,
In some magic peaceable place.
Were I the wind to herd the traveling clouds,
Or follow the sun’s golden rays,
Like a sprouting seed,
Like a questing doubt …
Perhaps I would recognize you
By your swaying hair
In the eyes of the nymphs.
Were I the wind to shimmer
Through the murmur of fountains,
And slide down the quaver of violins
Into the primal place where
Impulse awakens desire
To plumb the world’s beginnings…
Perhaps I would take you up, my children,
On the rainbow’s shoulders
To the hushed Eternal.
Were I the wind to melt the ice
From glacial mountains,
To bring forth mighty fire from the depths,
And the fateful old curse …
I would raise you to the stars,
To some other, farther realm,
O, my bound desire!
February, 1994
I rode the grey horse down the fields,
And the many-colored tapestry on my chest
Unfurled to the sky.
I rode the grey horse with the wind,
And the white mane exploded,
Like a desert shattered in the purple light.
The southern wind passed through my fields,
And the sun gave them buds;
The flock from behind the mountain,
Across the mist,
Before our eyes,
Flew in as a red scarf.
They are gone,
Then return
From cradle to cradle …
Retreat!
The grasses sprouted on my fields
Now grow with yellowish boiling wolf’s milk.
The birch and walnut trees are budding …
Returning from a long journey
Everything bursts into last year’s love.
I rode the grey horse in the morning.
His chest began to foam,
And the road reached all the way to defiance.
I rode the grey horse at dusk,
And the hot sphere of the sun
Began inflating before my eyes,
And pulled out the quaking from my chest
As we rode downstream.
ENIGMA
I do not know how we came to be.
Old-time tales seem too mystical.
(Everyone takes wheat to his own granary!)
I do not even know when we parted,
Because the libraries of our Babel overflow
With volumes wrapped in bloody rags.
I simply no longer believe
The old truths and the new lies!
They told me a Thousand and One Nights
Of brotherhood and common blood
Of our grandfathers butchering one another.
Convincing me, and all others like me,
By scheme and by passion,
That our genes were the same!
… Even the ones known to be butchers.
That our genes were the same!
Sometimes I just wanted to dream
Of some creator in an old castle,
Some prophet …
I still do not know, when downriver,
Instead of clear waters and scented grasses,
Blood flows and stench spreads,
Who I am. Where I am from.
… And why all over again?
What kind of men use their brothers’ skulls
To build the walls of their future?!
To whom will they tell new tales tomorrow?
THE PAST
The past creeps up in a ballet of sobs,
In a shrewish madness.
In its sunset, disturbances can be read,
The roots of shining medals
Tearful worlds.
In the past, each gram of progress
Swam in a sea of human tears.
Where love and hate were but two shoulders
Holding the head of the future.
Some asked the mathematician Nash
About his Nobel Prize,
While others were interested in his
Homosexual experiences.
Only Russell Crowe pleaded through tears
For them all to leave the man to his
Mystical genius.
The Laureate answered by mysteriously turning in his
Stormy geometrical circle.
If the past could return to the past,
And the future gave birth to the future,
If continuity could begin from nothing,
Ill-fated disturbances would remain
Twirling at their conception.
TIME
Timea spark beyond the eye’s reach,
And a tremor whistling beyond our senses,
And a glass emptied of wine
Before the glass-blowers cheeks have glowed;
The wind
Discerned in the collision of temperatures.
Time is a picture torn from thoughts,
And the frozen tip of an Inuit boy’s nose.
Spaces develop in time
And red volcanic lava darkens.
In time are borne the symbols of the past
And the present was imagined in minds long lost.
Just as you think you have hold of it,
That you have crawled your way
Into its immaterial structure
And that you have it,
That you have nailed it into Einstein’s relativity,
It scatters itself with your ashes
And rings like the bells of the foggy distance.
Time meant precision to Kant,
To Tito, it was the magic of history,
To Clinton – the bitterness that follows pleasure,
To Sartre – infinity.
Time, in the defiled eyes of a Bosnian girl,
Has frozen into a surprise, a pearly shell of hope.
It is the butterfly’s larva,
The fog’s tadpole.
In time Goya’s Nude Maya
Was racing around the windmills,
Wrapped in a cape of tulips.
Time is born in time
Paraphrased in calamity
Like a genie from a magic lamp
It gets free.
HUMAN
Politics are still playing with human lives!
Human is not just a word,
And human lives not just a simple phrase!
Human is more than feeling in a poem
And far beyond the complex hero of a novel.
Human is the creator of songs
And miraculous creations.
In the human imagination, life is ethereal,
And death sometimes the beginning of a new life,
And the faces of the gods remarkably similar to those
Of humans,
And the nature of Satan,
And the innocent, fearful eyes of fawns …
Human is not a tombstone
With a pedigree in the album of life,
Nor some marginal branch on the family tree,
A picture in the frame of rainbow colors,
Runner, sailor, seducer, scoundrel …
Human is an imagination from some other world,
A stylized pirouette in a boiling cosmos,
An image bursting with life.
Human is a Bosnian
Walking along Vancouver’s Broadway
Breaking the chains of the silent past,
And peeking a look into the uncertain tomorrow,
Into mornings full of hope and protest induced by fear.
Human is a glance pregnant with thought,
And the breath of life fascinated by time
On the path into the unknown.
TEAR
The spark from the trembling heart
Crawls like the whisper of breaking into bud
Before the avalanche of wondering
Sometimes you are cold and beautiful
Like Narcissus
In the extravagance of your baroque eyelashes
Like a lump
The flaming cold
Ascends
Sometime sweet
In the midst of scents
Youth’s secret hopes
From inferno to paradise
The noiseless path
Of warmth
NAIVETY
Before the stage when my thought stiffened in emptiness,
I had naively believed
That only politicians of George W.’s stripe
Instigated wails
Above the tired city,
Hypocrites and manipulators in chamber-pots,
The Andean vultures of a lower rank.
To defend the thesis
I paraphrased Zweig in the political encyclopedia.
In my poetry I built the stale philosophy
Of art before interest
And of ethics in the shaken dignity of true believers,
And of unity in the chaotic optimism of suffocation.
From Chomsky I asked the perfection of the feelings of perfidy
To determine the bond between the East and the West,
That political and disastrously efficient one.
And the boundary,
Like the Equator,
Which connects two distrustful halves.
Fists in the official salute
Of the economical West and the hungry East.
In Coquitlam the painter Bahic planted flowers
Next to the sculptures of Bill Reid.
Japan cannot possibly be the land of the rising sun,
Because the sun does not rise in the west.
It is shameful to suppress people
Within the boundaries of historical anachronism.
In the wheel of evolution
The fogs above the bewildered waters …
The wisdom of the world
Moves in the alignment of heavenly people.
Maps and new shapings!
I was hoping for the time of flexible definitions
And not for the stink of burnt forests in the Okanagan,
Even if embraces were to disappear in the abysses of pleasure,
And love to create institutions of illustrated ceremony
Above the foul stench of profit and interest.
GREEN APPLES
They hoped, when reaching a real orgasm,
To discover the music of pleasure,
Polyphony,
But they
Caught the feeling of incompleteness,
Pleasure mixed with guilt,
Resignation.
The destiny of immature rubber plants
In the magic of life-scents …
If I am another leaf in the creation of your process,
Even a tiny ring in your chain,
I am leaving!
I am refusing the role of a link between the cars
&nb
sp; Of a train speeding into the abyss of tomorrow.
I do not seek comfort in a questionable euphoria.
In that holy water is the curse
That the happiness in our hands
Is an illusion.
Up the hill to reach pleasure,
Delighted,
After the top, an abyss
Till the next hill,
A curse …
Our instincts are the wind
That shakes green apples
In the illusive light of a hallway.
BRANCH
Extending yourself like a hip
Rounded and warm
You bend
Bend
Beech branch
Coiling up in the sky
You wrapped your hair in the foggy dew
Helical branch
To be the one
The only one
In the shape of searching
Your skin is glistening and wet
How you did coil yourself
Like a viper
Beautiful
With fear in the eyes
With wind in the hair
THE BUILDER OF BRIDGES
Man is not a tree to stay where it is planted.
Even if he wanted to, he never does,
Or others do not let him.
If only he were a bird to return in spring
When a calamity is over.