Nymphs or Penelope …
Uncertainty behind the foamy wave,
Or the marble obelisk on Ithaca.
We both loved minute moments of time
And shared Hadrian’s frustrations
And the feeling that at journeys’ ends,
Even if covered with roses,
Beyond greatness and sensibility
Abysses await.
And in times of trouble small things are life-gifts,
In illness, the moments when pain sleeps.
I feel his shudder. And fear.
And again the feeling of passion. His reincarnation …
He reacts to the buzzing of bees drunk with blossom.
Tell me your poems, he whispers.
I need new moments for love.
I cannot have enough,
Neither for the beginning nor for the end.
MUTATION
Nash introduced to mathematics
The obsession of imaginary life.
To the numbers thirty and fifty
He gave the loft of vernal winds
And into set theory gathered all learning.
In division, he pictured worlds.
When they diagnosed a schizophrenic intuition in him,
He was drawing the geometric progression of points.
Asked about the inverse of history,
He declared hope for the equality of instincts.
He dreamed of anthems
And bannered flags
In a futurist Freudian agony,
Churchbells at the museum gates of the revolution
On the red square of dreams.
Someone’s new table of multiplication
Frightened him,
And color-matching in the rainbow’s spectrum
Drove him into the zone of arithmetic mutation.
All along
The margins of his consciousness
Some children played the wheel dance
In Nash’s collection of identities.
Mystic genius, throughout the night he laughed
At the unknown in the theorem of accumulation.
For him the calculations played by tipsy pianists
Are preludes to the theme
In the abyss of a mindless civilization.
GIFT
Last night in my dream full of dreams
I saw my imagination. I dreamed of my feelings.
And of selfish hope.
I saw Mount Osjecenica, from my youth, from Bosnia,
With its bare rocky head.
I saw it in the icy Canadian North.
In the mountains of the Yukon. Transplanted.
Closer to me.
As if it were bathing in the clear waters of Vancouver
Harbour. In my pride.
My yearning brought it from there.
I dreamed of giving it to Una and Adrian,
My descendents in the cold North.
To Una, the most beautiful girl in the world,
Even if judged by the eyes of others.
And to Adrian, too serious and bulbous,
Who has already pronounced the word “da-da”
Both in the language of his forefathers and in English.
I see, and nostalgia comes out through my sweating,
Our very Balkan faces climbing my mountain
And pulling a sled,
Like other children on the ice of North
Under the sky adorned with the lanterns of stars.
I have always wanted my descendents to pull sleds
Up Mount Osjecenica,
No matter where on our tiny planet.
I wonder why,
Against my will,
Tears run down my face
In my last night’s dream.
THE SMELL OF DUST
When I close my eyes in early spring,
The smell of dust brought by the wind of my youth
Brings the feeling that time stands between me
And the images beyond the frame of transience.
It seems to me that time pushed me away
From those bright colors on paintings
Of merciless passing.
But not the feeling when I see again
How we flew kites
Mixing with dust in the wind,
The one that blows from the south.
We flew them down the field together
And we did not know
That we belonged to different tribes,
The smell of that old dust was hiding
The whole winter in my joy.
When I close my eyes in the dawn,
While the sun opens the eyelashes of its dreams,
I feel the smell of smoke coming out of the bosom
Of our worm-eaten shingle houses,
A long time ago when we would sit at the table,
Both together Muslims and Christians,
And first gnaw barley and corn bread
To later earn a heap of Ramadan and Christmas treats,
And when we swore only by Tito’s name
And by our mountains,
That we’d always love each other.
In front of my closed eyes passes dust in the wind of time,
The dust that stays when the wind abates
In the imagination of my joy.
Behind my closed eyes awakens the feeling
That all the people in this world
Came from the same joyfulness,
From that elixir in our spirit
We all crave and hope for,
Like long-necked glasses
That are happy only if filled with wine,
And wine-drunk travel through our lives.
COLORS ON FACES
Daltonists walk the streets
Through the steaming spectrum of destructive colors.
For them black and white are equal
And reflections of imagination in their splendor.
Marvelous colors of the butterfly’s wings
Waft insight to my intuition. Messages …
Pacifists pray on the streets.
Hands draw flowers on the pavements. The happy call out.
Smells instead of colors on our sleeves.
Mevlida Karadza in the carriage of bliss.
The end … And the beginning of the new century.
The song on the streets of Lille. On pavements,
The French draw the characters
From the Diary of the People of Sarajevo
At the end of the century of extremes.
Her one hand clutches at the roots of survival,
The other a new life by the Pacific.
The Eiffel Tower in clouds.
Magdalena at the mercy of the expelled.
The colors on people’s faces are a challenge to me,
Something pagan in the nightmarish civilization.
At the Sorbonne, Mevlida demonstrates.
She did not choose the colors on her face,
Nor to be born in the midst of spring
In the old wooden house under the golden apple,
Nor to have a kerchief wrapped around her head,
To be blessed with sacred water.
Winds borrow the fragrant color of the curses
Electrifying the hairs of her defiance,
And push her outrage through the turbulent times,
Above the cascades of her feelings.
My colors are stolen from the reaped fields,
Torrid,
The last whispers of th
e sun over the roofs of our past,
Triumph in the snowy avalanches of destiny.
The springs of merry notes
In the melodies of the cheerful.
The faces are only
These and those,
Imaginative moves of ballerinas
In my wide open eyes.
SNOWFLAKE
the tiny flame
in the icy storm
of wondering
the confused jester
solitary
floating like a smile
in the gray shadow
above dew-imbued hopes
the glitter of the blossom in the eye
on the furrowed brow
in the hair
the easing of the raving of frozen scents
it strides down the cobweb of dusk
big headed
toward the unkind canvas of dawn
in flight
the flower of crystal anxiety
without stems
in a snowdrift
deceased bird of the universe
THE POET
The poet is not just a man
Even if he had the entire planet in his head
And all the riches of the Larousse Encyclopedia,
The programming of all possible genes,
Senses for various virtues …
In his visions thrive the instincts of future creations,
In his imagination – prophecies.
The poet is a museum of different worlds.
It gathers the mighty, and the tiny ones.
The bygone.
Across his mind run rivers;
On his lips call silent winds
That bend the shoulders of bony mountains;
And joy, grief, tremor and yearnings,
Shameless dreams of the crafty fingers of ploughmen
And fruit-growers,
Circus jongleurs, tennis players,
Painters and con men,
Rich dimwits,
Profiteers …
The poet’s eyes are mirrors
Teeming with longing glances,
Sighs and tears,
Boundlessness.
In his ears echo the whispers of the pious
Awakening the symbols of their hopes,
And the crippled ones
When inaudibly praying for their extremities
To grow in their sleep …
In the poet’s senses teem the emotions of escape
When the beheaded life turns to horror,
And the encounters
When the sun’s rays entwine with dark shades.
In the poet’s realm
Instincts clash,
Identities scream,
As if thunder wondered over a severed flower.
There reign spectrums of artificial hues
In the tearful eyes of the sexually colorblind.
In the depth of his eyes
The harmony of the world,
In the breath of his heaving lungs
Chaos and curses.
The poet breathes life into words
And turns words into life,
Into an ever changing, keener feeling.
His creations
Are the essences of creations,
A sweet elixir from the sea of life.
The poet is Marko Vesovic,
Delighted with the pride of the wounded,
And George Bowering with the instinct to see things
In a constant motion.
SERENADE
I do not really want
All things to turn into desire.
I do not want all my delight
To come only from joy.
Since birds became strange
In a magic breath of wind,
Street encounters
And nature’s spring call
Have become my wishful thinking.
In this world I plead for drops of glitter
From the clouds.
In despair when I awake
I seek refuge in a dream without despair.
I do not believe in colorful deceptions.
When I feel I am but a grain of sand in an hour-glass,
I force my imagination to stope
The fatal abyss
At the hour’s waist.
In the past, all is past.
For the future I need hope.
But in every present moment,
As moments live their lives
I’m sure that I myself
Sing my own life’s serenade.
WHEN OUR LIPS TOUCH
When our lips touch,
Our eyes darken,
And all the gates
Welded by our hands
Open.
When our lips touch,
Our chests tremble,
And the burning fire
Travels down fertile fields.
When our lips touch,
Reality is transformed into a dangerous flame
And grain ripens once more.
In lips’ trembling touch
Rare seeds begin to sprout,
And, with their buds,
They enter
Our worlds.
RAINS IN THE ROSE GARDENS
It is March. This one too brought the weather
Of wind-stripped waves in the open sea.
Rain is rain even when it falls silently and monotonously.
This one sneaks from the dreary grayness of the sky
And night creeps into the moist darkness
As skillfully as profiteers creep into our pockets,
Like the nostalgic voice of Sarah McLachlan,
Spontaneous breath of my contacts with nature.
I know youth does not accept boundaries
And instincts rule the planet.
Blanca, too, changes spontaneously,
By the miraculous law
I used to notice only in others’ children.
The heat in the eyes of my little girl frightened me
While she turned invitingly
For a group of grade-ten boys.
Neither their clothes nor their game
Reminded me of the time of my youth.
The difference between us scared me
And their freedom without filters,
And their rose-powdered cheeks.
They did not care if,
And where, and when,
Some crack-brained politicians might pull us into the fighting
Of masses against masses,
Or that this was the third year
Of Bush’s rampage in Iraq.
I believed I knew youth does not accept boundaries
And instincts rule the planet.
I feel some new time around me,
Even though rain still falls from gray-uniformed clouds.
In every youth there are longing glances
For the human body. A coincidence …
Blanca’s eyes are also different.
It seems that other creatures on this planet
Do not have the human taste for pleasure,
As if people came with warm spring rain
And with the timid smell of first primroses.
As if they came from somewhere.
I feel a midnight composition of fear
Instead of faith in the continuity of living.
It seems youth too does not accept boundaries
And instincts rule the planet.
Margitt sends me an e-mail. Around midnight,
Whe
n she returns from visiting her neighbors on Bowen Island.
“Do not worry,” she writes. “I know you and Norma …
You worry about the children as if they were alone
In the world.
Blanca is in good hands here.
Mine went somewhere too,
And I was scared of loneliness.
But they returned in a carriage brimming with life.
A carriage awaits her too
And in it some different time.
And the flowers abounding in Eden’s nectar
From the Pacific Islands of the North.
Shelley and Bill are good people!
In their house roses bloom always.
Where roses bloom all year round,
There rains are also different.”
MY THOUGHTS
My thoughts flutter
Like tree blossoms
Carried by a gentle breeze making flowery snow,
And down the alleys,
Through the turquoise rays of sorrow,
Weaving them into crimson drifts.
They catch me unaware,
As a flower touched by a butterfly
Sparkling the petals’ imagination
With the hues of its wings;
As when in the harbor’s calm,
In the sails of sleeping vessels,
Sudden waves conjure
Thirst for running,
A dance on water.
They force me to feel
That in the dark middle of night
Rays of light are waiting silent,
That time and space are mysteriously
Entwined in our lives,
As if wanderlust is born
From spindrift long dispersed.
My thoughts are playful
Like baroque facades,
Though for more than hope
I never hoped.
PANORAMA
I couldn’t sleep last night,
For no serious reason.
Just a timid trembling feeling.