Dejan Stojanovic – A New Friend

Tell me something less significant
Something about our biology, for instance,
About what you hear while sitting under the tree
About lonely lions in the prairies
Forget decorated generals
Tell me about Private Ryan
Tell me something only you know
And make a new friend

Dejan Stojanovic, Chicago, 1991 (Author: Goran Mikic)

Dejan Stojanovic — e. e. cummings

there are greater     poets
                        perhaps
but there is only         one
           
                  cum
                         m  
                             i
                               n
                                 g
                                   s

to be nobody but  yourself
Plato did not say         this
or we wouldn’t believe    it
            he heard us
(all)
            in the silence
unknowingly
            we spoke to him
            and
he sent us an    old    word       
flying over the new        yet
        unnamed avenue
a                    n                  d
            we heard him
whisssssssssssssssspering
===============================================

Avenue of Love = e. e. cummings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  
===============================================

Dejan Stojanovic‡, 1996

Vasko Popa (1922–1991) – Last News About The Little Box

The little box which contains the world
Fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box

The little box of the little box
Also fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box

And so it went on forever

The world from the little box
Ought to be inside
The last offspring of the little box

But not one of the little boxes
Inside the little box in love with herself
Is the last one

Let’s see you find the world now

 

Trans. by Anne Pennington

Vasko Popa (1922-1991)

Vasko Popa (1922–1991) – A Conceited Mistake

Once upon a time there was a mistake
So silly so small
That no one would even have noticed it

It couldn’t bear
To see itself to hear of itself

It invented all manner of things
Just to prove
that it didn’t really exist

It invented space
To put its proofs in
And time to keep its proofs
And the world to see its proofs

All it invented
Was not so silly
Nor so small
But was of course mistaken

Could it have been otherwise

 

Trans. by Anne Pennington

Vasko Popa

Places We Love by Ivan V. Lalic

Places we love exist only through us,
Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,
Places we love we can never leave,
Places we love together, together, together,

And is this room really a room, or an embrace,
And what is beneath the window: a street or years?
And the window is only the imprint left by
The first rain we understood, returning endlessly,

And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the night
Your son began to move in your sleeping blood,
A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,
The night you were frightened by your own light,

And this door leads into any afternoon
Which outlives it, forever peopled
With your casual movements, as you stepped,
Like fire into copper, into my only memory;

When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave.

Ivan V. Lalic (1931-1996)

 

The Spaces of Hope by Ivan V. Lalic

I have experienced the spaces of hope,
The spaces of a moderate mercy. Experienced
The places which suddenly set
Into a random form: a lilac garden,
A street in Florence, a morning room,
A sea smeared with silver before the storm,
Or a starless night lit only
By a book on the table. The spaces of hope
Are in time, not linked into
A system of miracles, nor into a unity;
They merely exist. As in Kanfanar,
At the station; wind in a wild vine
A quarter-century ago: one space of hope.
Another, set somewhere in the future,
Is already destroying the void around it,
Unclear but real. Probable.


In the spaces of hope light grows,
Free of charge, and voices are clearer,
Death has a beautiful shadow, the lilac blooms later,
But for that it looks like its first-ever flower.



Ivan V. Lalic



A Forgetful Number by Vasko Popa

 

Once upon a time there was a number
Pure and round like the sun
But alone very much alone

It began to reckon with itself

It divided multiplied itself
It subtracted added itself
And remained always alone

It stopped reckoning with itself
And shut itself up in its round
And sunny purity

Outside were left the fiery
Traces of its reckoning

They began to chase each other through the dark
To divide when they should have multiplied themselves
To subtract when they should have added themselves

That’s what happens in the dark

And there was no one to ask it
To stop the traces
And to rub them out.

Vasko Popa (1922-1991)