Places We Love by Ivan V. Lalic

Places we love exist only through us,
Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,
Places we love we can never leave,
Places we love together, together, together,

And is this room really a room, or an embrace,
And what is beneath the window: a street or years?
And the window is only the imprint left by
The first rain we understood, returning endlessly,

And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the night
Your son began to move in your sleeping blood,
A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,
The night you were frightened by your own light,

And this door leads into any afternoon
Which outlives it, forever peopled
With your casual movements, as you stepped,
Like fire into copper, into my only memory;

When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave.

Ivan V. Lalic (1931-1996)

 

The Spaces of Hope by Ivan V. Lalic

I have experienced the spaces of hope, The spaces of a moderate mercy. Experienced The places which suddenly set Into a random form: a lilac garden, A street in Florence, a morning room, A sea smeared with silver before the storm, Or a starless night lit only By a book on the table. The spaces of hope Are in time, not linked into A system of miracles, nor into a unity; They merely exist. As in Kanfanar, At the station; wind in a wild vine A quarter-century ago: one space of hope. Another, set somewhere in the future, Is already destroying the void around it, Unclear but real. Probable. In the spaces of hope light grows, Free of charge, and voices are clearer, Death has a beautiful shadow, the lilac blooms later, But for that it looks like its first-ever flower.

Ivan V. Lalic

A Forgetful Number by Vasko Popa

 

Once upon a time there was a number Pure and round like the sun But alone very much alone It began to reckon with itself It divided multiplied itself It subtracted added itself And remained always alone It stopped reckoning with itself And shut itself up in its round And sunny purity Outside were left the fiery Traces of its reckoning They began to chase each other through the dark To divide when they should have multiplied themselves To subtract when they should have added themselves That’s what happens in the dark And there was no one to ask it To stop the traces And to rub them out.

Vasko Popa (1922-1991)

Dejan Stojanovic — The Sun Watches Itself

The second collection of Dejan Stojanovic’s verse, The Sun Watches Itself, is covered by a metaphysical and philosophical veil. Eleven segments are connected by these two abstract approaches and by such key images as a circle, suggesting infinity, and silence, reflecting space and eternity. The circle serves as a powerful symbol and a device of the perpetual in this poetry: “the end without endlessness is only a new beginning,” claims the poet. Thus, one of the poems bears the title “God and Circle,” symbolizing the perennial search for an exit and the eventual finding of one, which only leads into another circle and to continuous evolution. This prompts Stojanovic to pose the question “Is God himself a Circle?”—implying that God is endless and ever present.

Although concise, the poems convey in a powerful and specific manner messages from the triad circle-God-eternity, connected by man’s destiny and the poet’s concept of human life and origins, and of the universe itself. In other words, microcosmic observations lead to macrocosmic revelations and didactic conclusions. The poems seem to teach us what is obvious in the context of common sense, often surprisingly remote to the modern man.

In terms of style and format, the author has a coextensional approach; he uses relatively simple expressions and words in an interplay of brilliant meanings that bring about highly complex but easily readable structures. If elegance is represented by simplicity, then these are some of the most elegant verses imaginable, unadorned verses that are a source of beauty and wisdom. Stojanovic’s perceptions of light and darkness, of fantasy and reality, of truth and falsehood present us with a circular format of infinity and resurrection.

The format has its logical beginning and end. The Sun Watches Itself begins with poems dedicated to God and the universe, then descends from the metaphysical to the philosophical, focusing on more ordinary such us the symbolic meaning of a stone, a game, a place, silence, hopelessness, and the question ”Is it possible to write a poem?”

Stojanovic’s collection might well serve as an affirmative answer to this question. The poet has taken us on a long journey from God and universe to our everyday world. We all seem to be a part of a circle, says the author, searching for the eternal in the universe, only to realize the finality of life on earth. The poet’s message is doubly effective for its extraordinary, soul-searching content and its reflective, powerful language.

-Branko Mikasinovich, Washington, D.C.
WLT World Literature Today, A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Volume 74, Number 2, Page 442, Spring 2000

Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches Itself (Sunce sebe gleda), Belgrade, 1999