Bosnian+Poetry

From the "Mourning of Sarajevo" journal
 * 1. Goran Simic**


 * The Face of Mourning**

Well I know mournings's face whom the Sarajevo wind strafes while flipping through newspaper pages stuck together from pools of blood on the street where I awkwardly watch my steps with a small loaf of bread under my arm. It's in the river too when its waves sway a dead woman's body on whose arm I notice a watch as I run across the bridge with a bucket full of milk. And, in the chill of December, I saw that face in a hand motion that stuffed a shoe of a never grown child into a wood-burning stove. It's a face that returns its thanks on the back of family photographs that flutter beneath garbage trucks. And it is the face that rebukes a trembling pencil for being incapable of writing a bulky dictionary of lament. A face which nightly keeps me from sleeping which is why I watch my neighbor who is always awake by the window staring into the blind darkness.


 * It can start all over after all**

After I buried my mother and ran from the cemetary in a shower of shells after I gave back my brother's rife to the soldiers when they brought him back in twisted canvas after I saw the flames in my children's eyes as they fled into the cellar amongst horrifying rats after I wiped an old woman's face with a rag fearful that I might recognize her after I saw how a hungry dog licked his bloody wounds on a street corner after all of this I'd like to write poems like news reports that are so empty and uninteresting that I could forget them the moment someone asks me on the street: why do you write poems like an indifferent news reporter?


 * A Love Story**

Bosko and Amira's story, who in escaping Sarajevo tried to cross a bridge hoping that on the other side where the bloody past reappeared anew there could be a future for them, was the media-event of the Spring. Death was waiting for them in the middle of the bridge. The man who pulled the trigger wore a uniform and was never accused of murder. The whole world press wrote about them. Italian articles wrote of Bosnia's Romeo and Juliet French journalists praised love's inseparability which tear up political boundaries. The Americans recognized in them two nations' common symbol there on the bridge split in two. The British saw their corpses as examples of wars' absurdity. And the Russians just kept quiet. The dead lovers' photographs spread out in the blooming Spring. Only my Bosnian friend Prsic who secured the bridge was forced to watch day after day how the worms the misquotes and crows finished off Bosko and Amira's bloated bodies. I heard how he cursed when the Spring wind blew from the other side of the bridge the stentch of decay forcing him to pull on a gas mask. About that however not one paper made mention.

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