Poems

Poems

In my pocket I still keep the key to my former home
Building a house after the war
The sun warms everyone everywhere equally
With a rusty bayonet from World War One
Come, love, quickly into the garden
I don"t know when I will go blind
Whenever we meet, we gaze at each other for a long time
Most often I speak to the dead
All my life I am saying good-bye to life

After the war we’re building a house … After yet another war,
during which many people have remained without a roof over
their heads, we’re building a house and arranging the garden
around it. We’re building it on the scale of a snail’s house,
small and beautiful, but for two. We learn from
the sparrows. We ask the wind for advice, and
the rain. We build it with hands that smell
of soil into which everything that comes from it
always returns. With hands that gently
touch and, exhausted, laugh loudly like
an elder-tree in bloom. We’re helped by stone and water,
which we unite with the smell of lavender and
images from a dream … After the war we’re building a house …
For two bodies that will lie in bed as if
under a blooming apple-tree, and for two souls that will
silently wander around it like the soul
of an old woman who had lived and
died among its walls … We’re building little walls
that will cut us off from cruel reality,
and stairs that will lead us beyond
the known, to where only two who love
each other ever get … After the war we’re building a house … Day
and night, although we’re only too aware that we are
building tomorrow’s ruins.

AuthorJosip Osti
2018-08-21T17:23:27+00:00 April 1st, 2004|Categories: Poetry, Blesok no. 35|0 Comments