THE ROSES OF FRANZ FERDINAND
My grandmother has been sleeping for three days already
and no one can wake her.
In her loud breathing
I hear the sky rearranging
and how flocks of birds converge
somewhere over the Atlantic.
Death is painless
when it is shorter than thought
and faster than a swift.
Like Franz Ferdinand’s shots, for example,
which, during 1913,
put more than
5,000 deer to sleep.
In the break between two shots
so many roses, roses
in the rose garden,
so many petals
among the antlers.
In the break between the moment of death
and news to loved ones
the mummified loneliness of being.
Like, say, the loneliness of Princip’s hand
between the Vidovdan movement
and gangrene crowned with amputation
in 1916, in Terezin.
The Black Hand.
Death is a synecdoche, I think,
and I listen to the sky rearranging
in dried lung membranes
slower than the budding of the most defiant rose
in the garden of Franz Ferdinand.
(Andrijana Kos Lajtman, from the collection Stairs for Stojanka K. , VBZ, Zagreb, 2019)