{"id":35894,"date":"2011-03-20T18:18:03","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T18:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=35894"},"modified":"2011-03-20T18:21:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T18:21:20","slug":"tomica-bajsic-seven-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/tomica-bajsic-seven-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tomica Bajsi\u00c4\u2021.<\/p>\n

In Circles<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes it seems as if I’m living on borrowed time
\nmy friends are dead and scattered across graveyards
\nwiped off the slate just like that, none of them even thirty
\nthose people I used to break bread with
\nthose people I slept in the same bunkers with
\nthose people I walked the same grass with, climbing onto tanks and falling down
\nhitting my face against the ground showered with bullets and shells
\n(oh sweet quiet earth you know our prayers<\/em>)
\ntheir ghosts still come back with the last of the echoing voices:
\nis there more juice? asks one who will die in an attack
\ntake care of my brother, says another who will be killed by tank
\nthe third one is trying to remember who he is and where he’s coming from
\nwhile his brain slowly switches off (he’d been hit in the head)
\nwhat’s over there? asks the fourth clutching a glass of red watered wine
\nhis gaze fixed over the hill where an ambush has already been set up for him
\nand a fifth is silent but his eyes are able to pronounce:
\nDeath.<\/p>\n

sometimes it feels as if I’d broken off the chain
\nI wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air
\nhearing the hum of fourteen storeys through the open window
\n(the smell of burnt flesh rising out of wooden caskets)
\nChrist the Redeemer is a lasting fresh wound among the black clouds
\nelectric fireflies scurry, curse and celebrate
\nthe time when pigs fed on human flesh
\ndown there is a house that once, a hundred years ago, used to be blue
\nnow it is a roofless ruin with frameless windows like empty eye sockets
\nthe inside is all wrecked but somehow at night it becomes alive
\nthe forgotten balconies fill up with flowers and light
\nwhile round black women with turbans lean against
\ncorroded fence and tiny echoes of their conversation
\nwhisper that there are three hundred thousand dead people on those fields
\nwhere my boots lost their soles
\nwhere my eyes drowned into the mud of the universe
\nwhere my heart was like an iron rope cut off from its anchor
\nwhizzing through the air in blind circles:
\naimless, aimless.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Wounded Man is Tempting God<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wandered around the forest of the enemy kingdom
\nand stumbled upon a piece of wire hidden in the grass
\nit was a buried PROM2 tripwire-activated
\nbounding anti-personnel mine
\nand in the split second before the explosion
\nI wanted God to make that cup pass me by
\nbut when the detonation threw me in into the air I saw pieces
\nof iron, pieces of my uniform, pieces of my flesh whirling
\nin orbit \/ sand stars porcelain four winds tartan
\nrazors ice \/ Joseph Conrad proposing to Freya the girl from
\nthe Seven Islands \/ my enemies cats stealing the planet oxygen
\ndigging through garbage \/ all lighthouses ablaze all the way
\nfrom the New Hebrides to the Pepper Coast \/ the President of Zimbabwe
\nCanaan Banana listening to the German radio \/ thousands of mumified fish heads
\nprophesying in alien tongues \/ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
\nmaking airplanes out of a piece of a newspaper –
\nI never liked Mozart and that’s what threw me down on the ground
\nwhile the Vienna boy’s Choir sang:
\n\u201ca jug goes to the water until it breaks
\na jug goes to the water until it breaks”<\/em><\/p>\n

God let that cup pass me by I thought there in the ambulance
\nlet me live for a little bit longer at least for another 100 years
\nI don’t want to die now that our time has come
\nI wanted my medals to shine like oil platforms
\nlighting up the night flights over the Atlantic
\nand my veteran’s charisma to become electric
\nlet my limousine slide through the crowd like Moby Dick
\nslid before the eyes of helpless captain Ahab
\nI never said I did not want to sell my soul
\nI was only negotiating the price
\nlet me be invited at the presidential party
\nthere are so many dishes I never tasted
\nthere are so many people on this Earth whose destiny
\nI never took in my hands<\/p>\n

I want to rob and preach to the robbed ones
\nI want to lie and laugh at the deceived ones
\nI want my place in the Ark so I can
\nwatch the flood with the cocktail glass in my hands
\nsince it is better to set fires than to be burned
\nit’s better to humiliate than to be humiliated
\nso let’s lay all the cards on the table \u2013 we have but one life
\ngive me a hundred cannibal whores from Borneo
\nlet me recover myself in the purifying fountains of youth
\ngive me power to last forever like the invisible poison
\nin the veins of all humans<\/p>\n

give me parts of their spines hands eyes brains hearts kidneys
\nmy hands are the hands of the sculptor thirsty for a work
\n– I’ll smile at you, the green pastures of Croatia
\nwith a smile of a harvester<\/p>\n

in front of the hospital alley cats rummage through garbage
\nthey have conspired to steal the oxygen of the entire planet
\nthe iron holders on the facade are empty
\nfifty years ago three flags hung there
\none for the gluttony another one for greed
\nand the third one for misery<\/p>\n

instead of them we hoisted up our tricolor
\nthe red is for the Christ’s mineral blood
\nthe blood of our dead the guardian subterranean blood boiling
\nthe white is for hope that we are fighting for a better civilization
\nthe blue one is for our blazen adventure, for frendship firm as those
\noverseas telegraph cables that fishermen sometimes find
\nwhen their nets get lost somewhere
\nreally deep
\nbut the cats came overnight and did their dirty trick
\nso the red stands for gluttony once again
\nthe white for greed
\nand the blue for misery
\nso, dear friends, one thing is certain:
\nthose very cats are the guardians of that other world as well
\nthese cunning cats that sometimes transform into politicians
\nthe cats that are still rummaging through garbage
\nconspiring to steal the oxygen
\nof the entire planet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cardinal Kuhari\u00c4\u2021 at 9827<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s Christmas Eve
\nand a gang of drunks is tasting bottles of \u00c5\u00a0ipon
\nand Silvanac at the illegal winery at the cemetery
\nfilling plastic and glass flasks of all sizes
\nCars rush over the edges of pavements
\nTonight when glassy bones of old men are humming
\nthere’s a draft in the church as someone left
\nthe door open
\nGrannies are protesting angrily and justifiably so
\ncounting who lit up more of those tiny candles
\nI would be also lighting tiny candles
\nand playing dumb
\nif I were old
\nThey say this pre-holiday shopping frenzy
\nhas been imported from the materialistic West
\nand that gradually every sense has been lost
\nof that sacred day when the Word became flesh
\nbut if you ask me it is the poultry that fared the worst
\nhaving been decapitated
\neach and every one of them
\nSix years ago they fed us ox roast
\nand now they’re staging mass spectacles for us
\nwith free sausages
\nand cheap pop stars
\nTito fed us a pig’s head
\nthat he stole from the attic
\nand our stomachs ached afterwards
\nfor decades on end
\nNow it’s starting to snow and I am also drunk
\nlike the other honest
\nCroats
\nOur path to the future is called
\nnational-humanism
\n\u2014 still life
\nwith a pig’s head
\n\u2014 while the Pharaoh
\nbreathes deeply
\ntucked inside his winter palace
\nperhaps contemplating another revenge<\/p>\n

while Cardinal Kuhari\u00c4\u2021 is at tel: 9872
\n\u2014 just a recorded Christmas message \u2014
\ngiving no answers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tito Apocrypha<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tito gnaws a pig’s head in the attic
\neyeing the street in fear that his parents might catch him
\nI don’t give a damn \/ he thinks \/ I’ll escape on my bicycle<\/p>\n

Tito riding a tram in Vienna under cover
\nwearing his best grey suit thinking:
\nwhy should I be any worse than those students?<\/p>\n

don’t marry her
\nmarry me<\/em><\/p>\n

Tito riding over Mt Romanija
\nfollowed by old Nazor stumbling through the snow
\nVladimir Vladimir \/ thinks Tito benevolently<\/p>\n

Tito waving at the rows of kids from his Mercedes
\nred bandannas are tied around their necks like nooses \/ the Sun
\nwill once grow dark \/ ponders Tito philosophically<\/p>\n

Tito is elegant even in death
\nhere are the mourners listed alphabetically:<\/p>\n

bears rhinos lions \/ chess players
\ncineastes \/ circus acrobats \/ clerks
\ncorn seller at work station no 7
\nCuban cigar industry \/ employees of the Institute for the History
\nof the Working Class Movement \/ the English Queen
\nGreenpeace activists \/ heads of the tenant’s councils
\nhistoric figures \/ hippies \/ honour students
\nIlich Ramirez Sanchez a.k.a. \u201cCarlos” \/ men with moustaches
\nofficers from firemen’s clubs \/ opera singers
\npresidents of fishermen’s societies \/ pretty women
\nprimary school teachers \/ punks \/ reserve policemen
\nretired warrant officers \/ Sai Baba
\nsoccer players \/ tailors<\/p>\n

Tito showed up again in a balloon above eastern Africa
\npointing his binoculars at a herd of zebras
\nthose devils with stripes \/ thinks Tito to himself \/ they are all the same<\/p>\n

don’t marry her
\nmarry me<\/em><\/p>\n

Tito says NO to Stalin and Stalin
\nresponds I don’t care anymore \/ who gives a fuck
\ndo you know how to calculate?
\nI have twenty one thousand eight hundred and fifty six of them
\nground into the leaves of the Katyn forest \/ I have three hundred thousand
\nsecretly burried ones
\nI have ten million of those liquidated in liquidations
\nI have all of their IDs \/ the photographs of their children \/ the letters
\nfilled with unwarranted optimism \/ their pencils \/ small change
\nI’ve got them all neatly placed on file<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We Have All Gathered Together Again<\/strong><\/p>\n

Out of tobbaco, coffee, wine,
\nthey appear at the edge of night
\nlike those voices you hear singing
\nsomewhere far down the street,
\nbut you cannot recognize the song.<\/em>
\n(Julio Cortazar ‘Los Amigos’)<\/p>\n

it came to me in a a dream that we have all gathered together again
\nat the long wooden table set up somewhere
\nin the middle of nowhere in the mountains
\nat the white wooden table covered with a chequered table-cloth
\nwith red embroideres
\nwe are sitting silent on a plateau surrounded with tall vegetation<\/p>\n

focusing on the transparent lemon blossoms
\nfloating around in the dreary May sky and
\nfalling down
\ninto our glasses and sticking onto the mud on our uniforms sliding
\ndown the frozen barrels of our rifles dissapearing in the grass
\namong it’s shiny sharp blades wrapping around our boots
\nseveral thousand years old. some of us
\ndrink pure wine while I drink it mixed
\nwith bubbling water pregnant with minerals
\nthose quartz crystals of roaring waterfalls
\nsome pour ordinary water into wine; there is a jug on the table
\nthat we fill at the well brimming with water as crystal
\nas the air around us so vacant that through it I can see the cracks
\nin the snow
\nmelting as the furthest of those glassy blak mountain tops.
\nfrom here it is<\/p>\n

perfectly clear that the Earth is round. the salty wind
\nthat rose from the sea overnight tiptoes across its flat surface
\npassing through invisible labyrinths
\nin an attempt to surprise the German shepherd
\nasleep in the shadow of the only tree that grows on this plain
\n(none of us is worried too much about the enemy dogs.)<\/p>\n

I light up a cigarette and throw the match into the grass filling my lungs with smoke
\nso powerful that it blurs my eyesight.<\/p>\n

we’re sitting silent sensing the lava of future volcanoes churning
\nsomewhere deep down bellow our feet
\n– the soil is born again having spent the entire winter locked under the snow
\nrolling in its sleep and sucking on dead organisms
\nrenewing itself and sprouting roots \u2013 hardening and widening,
\nbearing bitter, coloured sprouts.<\/p>\n

we sit there placidly watching the fruits of the mountain lemon tree ripening.
\nthe food on the table is modest as it always has been:
\na few loaves of bread, thirty hard boiled eggs. there are the maps
\n(maps of some other far regions) plus seven<\/p>\n

Motorola radios and five to six bandages, three infra red night visors, two regular binoculars for daily observation + seven military compasses who point nowhere safe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Man Fell in the Street From the Red Plague <\/strong><\/p>\n

Ivana! I will build you a house from pigmented Brazilian wood
\n(that’s the wood that does not lose the battle with time)
\na house with no sharp angles in one of the old ports from the Gold Fever era
\n(for everything is allowed in search for gold)
\nIt’s a small colonial harbour with three churches:
\none is the church of the black slaves, the other the church of free mulattos
\nand the third one is the church of white land-owners \u2014
\nthe name of the port is Parati!
\nthe front door will be past-resistant
\nthe walls would be covered in books: only valuable books,
\nthousands of books
\ntitles by Melville, Conrad, Stevenson and others<\/p>\n

notorious adventurers
\nI’ll build you a house from wood that cannot be eaten away by salt
\nor hardened by the Sun<\/p>\n

it’s going to be a house with long windows to the east
\ncommanding a view onto the hills and forests and steam railway
\nleading to the old mines
\nand from the west side you can see through binoculars the French castle
\nbuilt to defend from pirates
\nand the passage leading through the islands
\nWe’re going to eat big fish caught in the ocean \u2013 one to one.
\nLife will be easy for you!
\nSo easy that your eyes will turn into clear emeralds
\ngrowing underneath the humus of Mato Grosso
\ninstead of forest strawberries
\nYes, the windows will always be open and the curtains
\nwill travel down the corridors
\nwhite as the dresses of the old Bahian ladies whispering: candomble!
\nand on the ceiling I’ll build in a skylight
\nso our children can dream
\ndeep dreams under that Southern Cross<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

40c<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crossing the street, I saw a butterfly falling somewhere between myself and a fat black lady with her hands full of plastic bags.
\nLemon yellow, blue, and soft black:
\nI thought how come such colours on a dead butterfly and then I looked up to the tree tops, the granite hills and the clouds, and it came to my knowledge that this is the New World.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"tbajsic_skradin_mala\"
\nABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nTomica Bajsi\u00c4\u2021<\/strong> was born in 1968 in Zagreb, Croatia. He is a poet, prose writer and translator. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. He is the editor of translated poetry in Poezija \/ Poetry Quarterly Magazine<\/em>, Croatia, and founder of Druga pri\u00c4\u008da \/Another Story<\/em> publishing. He has worked also in restoration, drawing and design and is a board member of the Croatian PEN Centre. Published in numerous anthologies and literary journals at home and abroad, his writing has been translated into German, English, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Slovakian and Hungarian. Ju\u00c5\u00beni kri\u00c5\u00be \/ Southern Cross<\/em> (1998) was awarded the Ivan Goran Kova\u00c4\u008di\u00c4\u2021 award for younger poets in 1998. Zrak ispod mora \/ Air beneath the sea<\/em> (2009) was awarded the Dobri\u00c5\u00a1a Cesari\u00c4\u2021 prize.<\/p>\n

Bajsi\u00c4\u2021’s books include the poetry collections Ju\u00c5\u00beni kri\u00c5\u00be \/ Southern Cross<\/em> (Goranovo prolje\u00c4\u2021e, 1998), Pjesme svjetlosti i sjene \/ Songs of Light and Shadow<\/em> (AGM, 2004), Pobuna obje\u00c5\u00a1enih \/ Mutiny of the Hanged<\/em>(Fraktura, 2008) and Zrak ispod mora \/ Air Beneath the Sea<\/em> (Biblioteka nagrade Dobri\u00c5\u00a1a Cesari\u00c4\u2021, 2009), the travel prose work Dva svijeta i jo\u00c5\u00a1 jedan \/ Two Worlds & One More,<\/em> (Naklada Ljevak, 2007) and the art and short story collection Ana i vila Velebita \/ Ana and the Velebit Fairy<\/em> (NP Velebit, 2007). <\/p>\n

His translations include \u00c5\u00a0panjolske pjesme ljubavi i progonstva \/ Spanish Poems of Love and Exile<\/em> (DHK, Zagreb, 2002), Sve do srca svijeta \/ To the Heart of the World<\/em> – the poetry of Blaise Cendrars (MD, Zagreb, 2003), the Bruce Chatwin travel book U Patagoniji \/ In Patagonia<\/em> (SysPrint, 2006), Ju\u00c5\u00bena po\u00c5\u00a1ta \/ Southern Mail<\/em>, traveling through the poetry of Southern America (HDP Croatian Writers Society, 2009) and UREZI Antologija svjetske poezije o ratu, represiji, ropstvu \u2026 \/ Anthology of World Poetry about War, Repression, Slavery<\/em> – 160 authors, 300 poems from Afganistan to Zimbabwe, from ancient Greece to contemporary days (Druga pri\u00c4\u008da, 2010.) <\/p>\n

He is currently working on a novel entitled Okavango<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"tbajsic_skradin_mala\"Sometimes it seems as if I’m living on borrowed time
\nmy friends are dead and scattered across graveyards
\nwiped off the slate just like that, none of them even thirty
\nthose people I used to break bread with
\nthose people I slept in the same bunkers with
\nthose people I walked the same grass with, climbing onto tanks and falling down
\nhitting my face against the ground showered with bullets and shells
\n(oh sweet quiet earth you know our prayers<\/em>)
\ntheir ghosts still come back with the last of the echoing voices:
\nis there more juice? asks one who will die in an attack
\ntake care of my brother, says another who will be killed by tank
\nthe third one is trying to remember who he is and where he’s coming from
\nwhile his brain slowly switches off…<\/p>\n

By Tomica Bajsi\u00c4\u2021<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[484,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maintenant","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}