The Return Poem by Biljana Popovic

I wind my watch according to a white ship of Liburnija.
It is noon, my dearest one.
The waves and the sound of a siren which fades away in the haze of a midday calm sea.
The stone we used to sit on is wrapping in the foam, caressing and staring, just like me, at a deep blue.
Twenty years.
We keep counting, you and me, each in their own part of torn up world.
Me, at the window,
You, on the slippery ship stairs, with salt stuck to your lips, beautiful like sea grass on tired mermaids.
I see you again at the entrance of the city fortress, my forbidden one.
You are treading past the city walls like a proud monument of all our fathers' mistakes.
You've come back and astonished solitary Sphinx in an old painter's garden.
'What is its purpose', you asked me at the time we thought we would be asking and answering each other for the rest of our lives
'To be invincible like your laughter', I replied and meant it.
I am an ignorant man.
An almond flower got entangled in your naughty locks and covered the decades.
You took off your silver sandals in a golden sand and stepped into a shallow sea.
It recognized you, my kin.
It gave you a lick like once my puppy had done.
It grabbed hold of you like I had never done.
Do your blue eyes recognize the roofs on four waters,
Bare grapevines hanging over the terraces,
The looks of old women with long, gray hair?
No one can see you but me, you strange pale woman in a silk dress.
I know the curve of your shoulder and the line of hair
on the back of your head under a neatly coiled bun.
Don't be afraid, my dear.
A century-old olive groves have vanished, grapevines have burnt up and in their place clay soil is now blazing instead.
Vipers are stretching on the groundwork of your father's house.
You've bent over the wild climbing rose.
I can hear your sigh between the pines.
Don't be afraid, my one and only.
Only I know the way your hands move while you pull your hair backwards from your forehead
like some fairy dust.
And the tears… when you told me standing by the train: ' I am not crying, my dear.'
'You are ugly when you cry', I used to say.
Now I wish your tears forgave me for not having taken them seriously.
Three old Italian bunkers in overgrown blackberries staring with their blind gun holes.
Huge tortoises sunbathing on deserted polygons on which we used to collect bullet shells out of which I made you a necklace with imprinted small sea shells.
You laughed like organ.
You laughed like a cathedral.
You laughed as if you were not to laugh ever again.
'Let me enjoy myself', you used to say.
I held your back on my chest to make you comfortable while you enjoyed.
I quarreled with my childhood, shouted at my ancestors, swore your name and mine,
touching your eyelashes with my finger,
telling you the world was too small for such an amount of wind
you were rising while twinkling in the sun.
You walk as if twenty years have been but twenty minutes between two buses.
Your face is like an inside of a St.Jakob's shell, glorious and sweet.
Don't be afraid, my one and only.
It's only me.
Take another small step, lighten up with sparkles like with Champaign,
at dusk, at twilight, walk through ciders where broken church tower points to the sky,
the place at which I kissed you for eternity.
Ave Maria….
The bell toll has remained the same as well as the taste of counted up kisses.
Above our heads the ribbon of the sky is still courting the surface of the sea.
Tiny pebbles has been spilt on our youth and memories.
Don't be afraid my one and only.
No one will recognize you without keep on loving you,
with the love like mine with which I have drawn in crumbles so that you would find your way back.
Bluish smoke of a secretly lighted Saratoga cigarette is winding up.
'Don't smoke, you will die young', I said.
'I will die anyway, ' you replied. 'At least I will have the reason for not being old.
Death is good enough reason.'
'You are a fool', I shouted and hugged you, pulling you by your hand towards the valley under three wells,
into the maize, into a dusty vineyard.
'You are a fool to believe in old people's stories about the approaching war.'
'That's why it is good to die young', you said, ' Old people are cruel and know the rules of warfare.'
The old are asleep in their stone beds, my beautiful one.
Sit down between two blue blinds,
put on your lacy underskirts and touch the rosemary barefoot.
Don't look for the things that are ever-seen, ever-present,
let this deliberate coincidence be extinguished in a touch by which we are blessed,
each in their own unconfessed and unlived joy.
You being there, me here.
the two of us, together forever in redness and indigo blue sky into which we are sinking.
Let us kiss for one more eternity.
Mary full of mercy, blessed be thy name among all the women…
My love.