Poetryzine Magazine presents the poem by the Bosniak-French poetess Jasna Šamić
Illustration: Valentina Čip
Sometimes Paris is like
An invisible gallows
Hidden behind a veil
Of stormy senses
And fragile laughter.
My soul
Is cursed to them?
Sometimes – a prison
With wide-open doors
Leading to solitude and winds with tongues
Whistling like dogs,
And rains blowing like the wind
While a fierce word
Composes an ode to bitterness.
The specters of my dead
Drift through ghostly seas
Before my closed eyes,
Like sailing ships,
Dark and stinking,
Loaded with exhausted hopes,
Evoking my old cities
And my former lives.
What is more painful than the memory of happiness?
The image of celebration mixes
With the figure of a child
With a slit throat,
A dismembered woman,
A man who, like cattle, ruminates
His own excrement.
The Planet,
A ship of monsters,
Chants laments,
Screeching like a bird of prey.
My cities are in mourning.
Sometimes Paris is a prison,
Sometimes a celebration
That breaks the chains of the body
And it exults.
Then again, a dream
Where bells wail
Like a horde of cats drowned
In the boiling Stix
Translated into English by Jasna Šamić .
*This poem by Jasna Šamić has been selected to be performed in English on the new album by the German jazz singer Jelena Kuljić.
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