Maintenant #54: Tomica Bajsić
In 1991 when the war began, I ended up in the Croatian Special Forces until the end of the war in 1995. By then, I had two children to raise, the third one was born in 1998, so I stayed in the Croatian Army as an instructor, until I was pensioned in 2000 on account of my war wounds… There were writers who went to war so they could write about it, like Hemingway, as a best known example, who uses experience of the war as a subject for creating a literary career and creates vague images of himself that fit the frame of Life or Playboy magazine, but there are also poets and writers who fought for freedom, defending their countries, and the horror of war made them waterproof for trivial explanations. The youth of their generation was stolen and their lives offered in the butchering roulette where there is no winner, ever. That’s the way Sasson and Owen were writing, or Primo Levi, Miguel Hernandez and Blaise Cendrars, of course…
In the 54th of the Maintenant series SJ Fowler interviews the Croatian poet Tomica Bajsić.
Seven Poems
Sometimes it seems as if I’m living on borrowed time
my friends are dead and scattered across graveyards
wiped off the slate just like that, none of them even thirty
those people I used to break bread with
those people I slept in the same bunkers with
those people I walked the same grass with, climbing onto tanks and falling down
hitting my face against the ground showered with bullets and shells
(oh sweet quiet earth you know our prayers)
their ghosts still come back with the last of the echoing voices:
is there more juice? asks one who will die in an attack
take care of my brother, says another who will be killed by tank
the third one is trying to remember who he is and where he’s coming from
while his brain slowly switches off…
By Tomica Bajsić.