MASSIVE BIRD DEATH - PRISON NOTEBOOK

Almost thirty years later, while thinking about fate…, and penalty, I copy from my "Prison notebook" (Large format) a news, which the prisoners with the right to weekend outings, so to the purchasing the press, brought into my solitary confinement (without right on their rights).

Here I am, literally rewriting the said news, under the above title, from the "Interview", March 15, 1985, that reads: 

"In search for a temporary shelter from the cold that affected even southern parts of the Old continent, flocks of birds, on their way to Africa, were forced to land in Konavle, near Dubrovnik. Ducks, moorhens, snipes, geese, mockingbirds, blackbirds and other migratory birds, otherwise protected by Law, were welcomed by the virtuous Dubrovnik hunters, and exterminated overnight. One of them even boasted that he was killing some five hundred woodcock per day.

In the hunt there participated, besides 25.000 registered owners of rifles, for about three thousand "illegal" hunters, so, as a consequence, leaders from The Union of hunting societies of Dubrovnik were not allowed to show out their nose, fearing of losing in that shooting birds their own "scalps". That is how it happened that not a single report reached Republic Institute for the Nature Protection; neither on "the poaching", although it the took place during the ban."

t h e  e n d

In my Prison notebook (BF)*, upon this news, only spatially, are adjacent next verses of mine:

Out of me me will never become a song
with which swell the chest out of thrill
I will always be a chilly wellspring
a stony weir - a mournful poem

These verses, as a motto, stay on the cover of the Prison Notebook (SF).**

I know not who was shooting; hunters, or poachers, or journalists, or owners of the rifles, or those who issued the authorization for their possession, or producers of the ammunition, I do not know, but I do know that we, my child and I, just like birds, during our fly between “from there to there”, were, heartlessly, shot.

And that, thanks to God, birds and we,
as human and avian kinds,
in spite of them,
survived.