Letter to a Warrior From an Upright Tombstone
You have your big stone
Decorated with a picture of a soldier
You have your bow and arrow
Your sword and shield
You have your knightly clothing
You have it all
All that was yours
All that was left from you
You are independent on your soil
I am independent on what is not mine
You are foreign to yours
I am a foreigner to mine
I will never have my stone
Decorated with a picture of a soldier
I will never have my bow and arrow
No sword
No shield
No knightly clothing
Not even what was mine
Not even what will be left from me
I will only have a word
And what is left from it
You will eternally stand defending the homeland
And I will dream of the homeland
Where my footsteps were erased long ago
My stone will not be there
Nor my words
Nothing will be named after me
No words
No letters
Nothing will be known about me
No words
No letters
A word
Alone like that
Tiny
But very lethal
More lethal then a bow and arrow
More lethal then a sword
It will exist somewhere else
But that is not important to you
Just as your bow and arrow are not important to me
Your sword and your shield
With which you dreamt about freedom
They passed their judgment on you
He who lives by something dies by the same thing
You did not know
And you will never know
Freedom is something else
And nobody can give it to you
It is locked into a letter
Locked into a word
I know who keeps the key
And word
And letter
Enigma From the Stone
Victors write history
You wrote nothing down
In morning twilight
About your battle
And your victory
You just left
Never a word about you
Never a letter
A small simple letter
Not in the Bosnian Cyrillic script
Not in Latin characters
Not in the Glagolitic alphabet
Not in the Cyrillic alphabet
Where did the letters go?
Where did the words go?
We know about you
You remained on your soil
Generous
For which one day you disappeared
In gray stone ashes
You left without a letter
And without a word
And left the colossal wound
For new generations
You left all your pain
Buried in silence
You are enigma from the stone
And enigma under the stone
Why did you so skillfully hide it all
You escaped from yourself
But you could not escape from us
We found you under this large stone coffin
He told us about you
And about your life
About your secrets
He told us about all your loves
About Stamena
About Kosara
About Jelena
About Ivana
About Jovana
And about…about …about
We now know all we could find out
We know that it is not the end
And because of this we will discover every day
The enigma part by part
We discovered you
You resurrected in our letter
In our word
We won
We are writing history
And you are helping even unwillingly
In our victory
Now you know
You can run away from yourself
But you cannot run away from us.
PAIN
From pain into a poem
From a poem into pain
If you become a poet
You will follow that path
Because it is the borderline of life
If you manage to control that borderline
You will remain a poet
Poet guardian of all difficulties
Poet guardian of all pain and indiscretion
If you succeed in locking pain in a poem
You will know how to control life
With letters and words only
You will be able to fight with yourself
In the great arena full of pain
You will be able to tame wild ideas
And survive in this madness
Where self-control lost all meaning
If you remain a poet
You will go from pain into a poem
From poem into pain every day
You will not spend money on unimportant things
You will not make money
You will be free from financial problems
But burdened with needlessness
Of your existence and your poems
That will be your biggest pain
SAY HELLO TO EVERYBODY
Say hello to everybody on your way home
I love you because I hate you
And I hate you because I love you
Nothing new on my way home
How about you
What happened with the goldfish
In your small aquarium
Behind your brown leather sofa
I am not here
You are not here
Nothing new on my way
Nothing new on your way
Somebody caught the goldfish
And won three wishes
First wish a million goldfishes
Second wish a billion goldfishes
Third wish one more goldfish
Life is about that and also something else
Say hello to everybody on your way home
YOU ARE LEAVING
I offer you my arms
You are surprised
I give you two eyes
You become fascinated
We dance waltz
Through the stale air of verses
You float blindly
We stop behind endless greenery
You enter someone else’s door
You jump over ancient fences
You leave
You come back
I look at what is happening
Unexpectedly and passing by
You stand on my foot
And talk about fashion of the nineties
The smell of naphthalene in my nose
You are talking about the latest fashion trend
You are going away
My stretched-out arms are hanging in disappointment
Hugging empty space
Bon voyage