Most often I speak to the dead
Most often I speak to the dead…
Especially to poets and writers. Only they
come as soon as I call them. When I am,
frequently in a crowd, desperately alone.
Only they have enough patience to
listen attentively and with understanding to my
dirges, even when I forget that they are
with me, and carry on talking,
as I have done all my life, to myself…
Most often I speak to the dead…
Especially to poets and writers. Only their
living words, and even more so their living silences,
which I read from their lips overgrown
by grass, are in accord with their deeds.
I also speak to some of the living. But since the
war, during which many of those I knew,
also friends among poets, for a few years
besieged and destroyed Sarajevo, I speak
to them very rarely. And more and more frequently
not in the dying tongue of my mother,
but in the tongue of the dead poets that is
coming alive in these new poems of mine.