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In Vain I Wake Her (translator unknown)
Branko Miljkovic
I wake her for the sun self-explained by plants
for the sky strung between fingers
I wake her for words that burns throat
I love her with my ears
You have to go to the world`s end and find dew on grass
I wake her for faraway things that resemble these
for people who humiliated and nameless pass down the street
for anonymous words of city squares I wake her
for the manufactured landscapes of public parks
I wake her for this planet of ours that will perhaps
be a mine in a bleeding sky
for the smile in stone of comrades asleep between two battles when
the sky was no longer a big bird cage, but an airport my love full
of others is part of the dawn I wake her for the dawn for love for
myself for others I wake her though this is more vain than calling
a bird that alighted forever
she surely said: let him look for me and see that I am not there
this woman with the hands of a girl whom I love this girl asleep
without having dried her tears that I am waking in vain in vain in
vain in vain I wake her for she will awake different and new in
vain I wake her for her lips will fail to express her in vain I
wake her you know river flows and yet it does not speak you have
to promise to the lost name someone`s face in the sand And if it
is not like that cut my arms out, and turn me into a stone.
--
Sleepers
Awake I steal what they dream. (translator unknown)
--
Requiem (VII)
(translator unknown)
Death should be made a holiday because
the night can take our place any minute
--
The Last Prayer for the Dead (translator unknown)
Branko Miljkovic
For those who have taken advantage boldly
of the possiblity to die for those who
have stepped over their own corpses for their
death so necessary against death
for those who are now one
because the world is divided by human skin
into two parts and two and two equals
one when the last night falls
for those who have drowned
in the waters of eternal sleep as the sun
dies at the bottom of a distant landscape
buried for those whose words
have sprouted from the earth like medicine and revolt
let the distant sunflowers bow their heads
------
Chronics
(translation: Dragomir Kovacevic)
On the first day, birds died and serpents lodged
in the nests and winds
On the second day, fish went out of water, and water flew away
empty
On the third day, the forest moved towards town, but town was lost in
nowhere
On the fourth day they erected the ćele-kula made of skulls and of
shrieks,
On the fifth day, the forest was collecting the headless bodies
in the river's bank
On the sixth day small fires wanted to imitate the
sun
On the seventh day, angels did not yet sing
But on the eight day, the ash-bird sang
and the wall whispered.
Requiem
(translation: Dragomir Kovacevic)
[..]
V
You were plastered into stone, invisible ones,
You all were ready to die
one within another and so it was,
hail you weird river of salvation
you were searched for in the dark lump
of fainted senses, in the limiting frontiers
you and surprises were not discovered.
Fare thee well my town, where my memory ceases
You are now all dead and your body
is an untouchable record and warm
handful of Serbia's earth and our
rephren:
Their mouths were filled with sand and they were
mute
Fare thee well my town, where my memory ceases
Hail you weird river of salvation
...
(translation: Dragomir Kovacevic)
I hope that I might speak
if I leave myself with a hope to return
Even passing through a desert till my burning place
Even through death till the doors of truth.
Maybe I'll find a consolation
in the wrong distribution of words. Or I'll discover
how hopelessly I kiss her like a rain, like time
as a man who changes the words, but not the hidden world.
I do believe that I, in spite of my poem
without land, must enter the night without hope,
into oblivion that I spread me into,
that poem-bird without its hill-tops
but only hoping not to trait my death, to live while I die.
The one who sings doesn't know if he means love
or death, by his song. When an odour makes a flower shiver,
where then the flower stands, down there on the verge of
the messy yet a hollow world, or where its flower stands?
Each poem is hollow and starry as well,
Death or love can't substitute it.
The poem is all that's left to me till the day of no return,
The hollowness that sings to me, and my rosy quietness.
Oh you poem so hollow and starry,
while your bud lies to my hearth, circulating through my blood system,
If I pick him up, he will abandon my loneliness,
If I abandon it, he will flourish secretly behind.
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