Svet je vmes
What are our poets smiling at?
What are our poets smiling at?
There’s nothing funny in our tribe.
Many lie murdered in gullies.
Our women and children are hungry and barefoot.
Unknown illnesses are mowing us down.
No new villages built and soon it will snow.
Despite all this, the smiles don’t fade from our poets’ faces.
As if facing sorrow brings them irrational, secret joy.
When we ask them what’s funny, they silently shrug,
And do the same when we demand they cheer us up in these dark times.
They guard the reason for their smiling just for their own enjoyment.
We trust them less and less, believe their sparse words less and less.
The smiles of our poets are truly mysterious in these poor times.
Did their minds burn out? Do they mock our common misery?
Their smiling sometimes cuts more cruelly than the weapons of our enemies.
But they are wrong if they think they will deceive us.
We will kill our poets only when we squeeze their secret out of them.
We will leave alive only the biggest blatherers, somber-faced and resembling us.
translated by Brian Henry
Poetry collection
published by: Pivec, Maribor, 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
When it was silent. Because it had no place anymore. And no meaning. None. Nowhere. When it stopped and was good without. And it was the living end when it was silent. Where, where did it go silent? Everywhere. What? Everything, everything was silent. And there was no more echo. And there was no life that is not mine in my words, no words that are not mine in my life. Nothing. When everything, everything was silent. And there was no more. And I knew it would never come back. Never. But it did, quietly and as if it were inevitable. It crept in like an unforgettable voice. Like a rhythm I could no longer shake out, out of my hollow skull. Mine? And it was repeating. A dull roll. And it wouldn’t go away. Go away, I said. And I didn’t say me. Get out, I shouted. And it was getting louder. It grew louder and louder in repetitions of movement. Where, where was it coming from? Not from the dead. Not from the living. From the blindness of my such gift? Into the stranger, who wanders without thought, turning absent, spinning on the empty mouth what he does not let himself utter. Always again. And am I myself the plaything of repetition? Again? But to what end? With everything that has no place. And not the present. Nowhere? Nowhere. And with nowhere everywhere. Where there is still a world. But no longer mine. One man’s world. Neither here nor there. In between.