Poetryzine magazine presents the selected poems by the Serbian poet Zorica Bajin Djukanovic
Planetarium
for Milutin Petrović
It was a wintertime promotion
he stuck his head
through the title of his book
and I thought
O O’Sullivan Owfully Obliged
Then we descended
into a pre-Christian catacomb
where we could
write playful messages
with our breath
it was an existential concept
feeding on gentle smiles
and hope that tonight’s benefactor
will assuage his companion’s hunger too
Unannounced
Miss Gardner entered too
arm-in-arm with Papa Hemingway
and when she laid her eyes on him
in the semi-darkness of the hall
she forgot that she’d just
promised something or other to Domingin
having received a bull’s ear
The life history of each
poem of his was written
with twenty-four-karat dust
on silk unfolding
from his hips
and it went on and on and on
an entire new planetarium
Homeopathic
Stepping outside the field of my body
he whispered I’ll keep your secret
so confidentially
that he blew away some of the dust
from the inner mirror
what could I oppose these words with
being a woman certainly
there would be something there to be kept
surely it wasn’t all on display
But I don’t burn my friends
after each act of betrayal
I carry this liquid bitterness
in a porcelain bowl
and sometimes just occasionally
I drink a few drops of it
following a homeopathic prescription
What trick will I
resort to now
in order to enter
his dream invisible
and show him that words
against which he could
press his ear
are but small shells of spent sound
dropped out of Buddha’s basket
Enamel
During bouts of fever
Under my pillow I put Relaxan
His book
Hoping it might take my head
To my cloud
But from the slippery covers I slide straight
Through the whirlpool of the title
Onto a page half unstitched
From browsing
Into a poem with a tiny light
And a small mirror
Wherein I never manage
To recognise my face
And due to teeth chattering
Remove a little enamel from the front ones
So the book is increasingly more mine
And increasingly less his
For it is padded with my mother-of-pearl
And so I slide down the pages
And fall through the membranes of verses
Who else would make
Artificial cumulus clouds for me
To keep me
Above the poetry of dreams
Paper people
They were born before the noise
while people looked one another in the eye
it is not known where
their tribe departed from
just how far they travelled
in the beginning they
hugged trees
which gave them their lives
so that they could inscribe theirs into them
they cultivated the cult of fire
with which they tamed their fear of it
Born with the anomaly
of shallow memory
they were not afraid
of unknown spaces
for they had created maps
with which they could
shine a light anew
onto nooks and crannies of their souls
when occasionally their minds darkened
they made bonfires of the only
pieces of evidence of their existence
Translated from the Serbian original by Novica Petrovic
*Zorica Bajin Djukanovic, was born in Mostar, ex Yugoslavia. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Belgrade University, the Department of Yugoslav Literature. She writes poetry, prose and literature for the young. She has published a total of seventeen books. They include the collections of poetry BLOOD CLOT (1994) and LINING (1999), the short story collections HOTEL PHILOSOPHER (2003) and SAID KING OF SUNSHADES (2009) and the following collections of poetry for young people: WIZARD
(1999), TINY BOX FOR A FIREFLY (2010), SUMMER DAY (2014), BRIEF LOVE POEMS (2017), MYSTERIOUS JORNEU (2020)… Her work has been featured in 60 anthologies, chrestomathies, textbooks, primers, readers and required reading editions. Her poetry and prose have been translated into Russian, English, Dutch, Rumanian, Ruthenian and Macedonian. She is the recipient of “The Golden String” for a poet’s entire opus in the spehere of children’s poetry. She lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia, as a freelance artist.
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