SREBRENICA IS A FALLING STAR
Sarajevo, July 00.
I would swear by One,
in Whose hand is my soul,
that Srebrenica is a falling star.
Still, I would swear,
five years later,
to the same.
*
And the man said: "When I drank Srebrenica's water,
my heart hurt no more.
Good water, good air, trees fruited:
apple, pear, cherry,
nothing's not there. . . ".
*
Everything, just no Srebrenica.
No, silver, Bosnian, falling, star.
Fell.
Tuesday,
the eleventh of July,
one thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-five.
("I'd go back to die there!")
*
That date,
around Srebrenica's neck,
was threaded up a thread of names,
all the jewels from the necklace of Civilisation,
who on earth would ever believe it!
*
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
*
*
I have yet to recall Holland and Brussels,
I have yet to call for help their geniuses,
Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel,
I have yet to ask them,
to paint:
the regions turned to Hell,
the torment of the innocent,
iconostasis of horror,
and, then, to thread up, a caravan, of, satanic, faces,
the horde of the damned,
lost souls,
on their, blood-soaked,
course,
in the twentieth century,
to Gehenna;
as they pass through
Bosnia.
*
To paint them, in sort of – classic way.
None of the modern arts of conceptualisation.
Everything exactly as it appears to be!
In Sarajevo,
from Thursday, 13. July,
about twenty minutes past eight in the evening
to Friday, 14 July, the year 2000,
finishing exactly at twenty three minutes,
eighteen seconds past four a.m.,
at the dawn, then, of a, new, ordinary, day,
and the dawn of the sixth, Srebrenica, year,
the first version of this poem,
which has lain for five years in the pit of my heart;
Download attachments:
