Born During The Seventies Poem by Miroslava Odalovic

I

The deepest thing within
Destroying the possibility of breathing
Will cry even when we’re gone
Even after our own death
We will remain
The homeland poets in the foreign countries
Obscure forces of alien lives
Too tired sights of alien eyes

The deepest thing within
Will move on breathing
When all our days are gone
Hopefully not dying again
Insane
Wretched descendants of alien pasts
Paying their bills with our own skin
Moving back to illusions
Building the worlds
Out of the ruins

Nothing has ever belonged to us
Nothing will ever be
The broken dawns in our minds
Deliver
The fronts of the dead
To move everything into nothing
Within the last battle


II

Were you in the universe
Scented by any scent
Your skin on the altar
Would not darken the repentances
Endlessly
No
There were no songs there to feed you
No sweet words to hear
Out there beheaded by the sky
You put the honeycomb
Into the order of nothingness
Look
What an incredible classification
Lies there within the chains
Out of pain and deception
They weep like dogs
They roar like bulls
Your settlements weep
The road to them treaded in lies

III

When we went there they asked
Where do our children go
The question enhanced the pain
The machine gun on your shoulder
Your head on holiday in Thailand
We believed it would never happen
And when it happened we believed
It would not happen again
And when it happened again
They did not dare to ask again
Where is it our children go

IV

They said you were their sail
They took you between clothespins
And put you on a wire
Letting you wait for the winds

They said you were their sail
Uniforms to sew
Green black grey and blue
Green black grey and blue
In no man’s lands of the nightmare

They said you were the sail
To sweep away the threshold of the world
To patchwork the holes of history and memory
Tearing out the words of salvage
Putting up tents to settle their power
Carrying you out in a packed coffin

(The poem is dedicated to all the victims of the Civil War in the region of ex-Yugoslavia)

Written in 1996.
©Miroslava Odalovic