Melancholy Is pathetic the only thing that remains After a sleepless night After a river with islands flowing like barges After a hope chewed up like grass in a rhino’s mouth But perhaps all such questions are superfluous Sometimes I feel I’m floating like a somnambulist Between the sky and your skyscraper That will be torn down at the moment when I wake up Up in those heights I feel only the winds’ messing around Your even-paced breathing Pains in my eyelids Entire universe upon your pillow The Danube, flat like writing paper And me By your misty windowpanes Chirruping with sparrows... Wake Me Up Only When You Make Sure I’m Really Dead If you feel music in my verses It is not because I have an ear for music It is because your nails are touching my nerves ever so slightly Like the artist’s fingertips upon guitar strings And my heart is beating like a drum in the rhythm of your steps and your words At the end of the poem, I close my eyes silently like the sizzle cymbals are closed at the end of a ballad While my fingers keep on playing a melancholy tune Wake me up only when you make sure I’m really dead When my words are hanged like notes committing suicide upon the violin key When the poem ceases to remind you of me When the evening comes on time, and the morning is unexpectedly late When the saints go marching in Rublev A movement of your hand Connects the soul with silence A century of minutes The world is small You will find everything easily, just Turn off the road Three angels like three butterflies Floating around your shadow The paint is dripping From the walls of the old monasteries Someone is shouting: Andrei, my son, where are you It is your mother The Moon From a reasonable distance, indifferent like a police constable The moon surveys the Nature The earth revolves around itself like the wheel on the roulette of the universe Only now and then noticing the stars Lit like lanterns in the quarters of old towns Without realizing the finiteness of the infinite He remembered her face at an early evening Her words flying weightlessly, like feathers The sea was wrinkled by the waves, like an enormous Shar-Pei A flock of birds, an arrow and bow over pensive water Silence, the smell of laurel, and the mast, like a sundial on a nutshell The unassuming lightness of fallacy and seductiveness of walking out of step Athens slowly travels over the sky and I wander through freedom Thought Ulysses When You're Asleep When you're asleep I see everything on your face: Wars end upon your lips And peace contracts are signed upon your forehead Your eyebrows, like two black clouds Above the sea that sleeps beneath your eyelids Your hair like all the forests of the earth Your nostrils, like two warm volcanoes, Your nose, like a ridge in the midst of the pacific Ocean. What is planet - in comparison with a head like that?! And those ears, like satellite antennae Catching the waves that come out of me And fly through your dreams Like through barricades On your lips, an everlasting gentle smile As a sign That still There is some hope There is hope. Translated by Zoran Paunovic All rights reserved®. Used by permission of the author Copyright©1999. By Radoman Kanjevac

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