ANIMULA VAGULA GAGULA
S A R A J E V O R O S E
W A R R H Y M E S
(fragments)
And said,
in a half voice,
as though she’d been begging:
Speak with me!
I feel so lone!
Among the rare who,
at the risk of their lives,
from the very start of the city’s
collective
ecstasy upon the very glancing at the
New World Order’s
just unpacked
relief,
refused to eat,
even to receive and sign
the American foul smelling pork,
wrapped in the packages of mercy for the Bosnian Muslim,
was my accidental war acquaintance,
my dear Fatima Vagula.
May God bestow upon her His forgiveness!
If they are slaying me,
there fought she back, for the first time brave and resolute in her timid life,
because of my Muslim name only,
then let them, cursed!
do me in
as a real Muslim.
To say the truth,
before this catharsis,
she hadn’t been enthusiastic about performing her religious duties, whatsoever.
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
She hadn’t been decorating her religion with the expansive Festivity cakes,
or participating in the mourning ceremonies.
On which occasions, each Sarajevo’s charshia Muslim woman minding for her good religious reputation,
should be adorned with the transparent Istanbul’s scarf;
itself trembling with fear,
to disturb not something important,
on the top of her,
frizzed,
head
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
My Fatima,
herself descending from the underprivileged,
never succeeded to understand this
Sarajevo’s mahala theology.
According to which,
being well-off and showing it
during various religious gatherings
is the evidence of piety.
She was living her small solitary life,
patiently coping,
a nurse herself,
with the illness that had very early devastated her juvenile beauty; gifted by God.
And from Him I asked,
while visiting,
after my forced several month long absence from the city,
her grave,
located on the very edge of the burial ground, which will tomorrow be flattened by a new highway,
what's the meaning,
oh God!
of these tiny existences?
answer me!
For what reason had they been at all sent by You to this world?
I beseech You,
by You,
answer me!
What and why? my Creator!
I wept a lot, remembering her
as she’d approached me,
for the first time,
ghostly thin.
Bashcharshia was also ghostly empty,
only now mine, when all my oppressors were on the hills,
or busy with the world policy,
or hiding themselves in the shelters,
or far,
far
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
It used to be Sarajevo's version of the Istanbul Misr çarshi.
She came up and set herself by me,
on a broken wreck-full shop’s
old-styled
wooden window-sill.
And said,
in a half voice,
as though she’d been begging:
Speak with me!
I feel so lone!
. . . . . . . . .
She'd went on with walking about,
ever emptier stomach,
ever more incurably desolate,
before silently died,
in her home,
reduced,
by her robust godless brother,
to a room.
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