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Writer's pictureA Too Powerful Word

Vojislav Karanović


Vojislav Karanović (1961) is a Serbian poet and essayist. He graduated from the Department of Yugoslavian and General Literature at the Philosophy Faculty of Novi Sad. He lives in Belgrade and works as an editor for Radio Television of Serbia. He has published nine books of poetry. His poems have been translated into several languages and Karanovic was rewarded with many prestigious awards for poetry.




Gentleness


Under the pulps of the fingers

quiver the golden hairs

of air.


It's the same as when at night,

hardly audibly,

the stars crackle,


because someone's palm,

gently moving down the top

of the head of the sky,


caresses the locks

of braided hair:

the constellations.





An Image


I know that life does not exist.

I know it for certain.


But what I wrote

was intended

exactly for those who

did not exist.


At one moment

someone would get absorbed

in my poem,

get pleasure from its images,

find himself there,


and the following moment

he would already watch me

from some cloud

with sad eyes,


having become himself image.

Image of the cloud, of the look, of himself.





Encounters


We encounter each other almost every

day, you go

downstairs, I go up.

We greet each other, sometimes not even that.

We nod at each other,

I go down, you go up.

We are still in the kingdom

of the living, and even if one of us

turned around to look at the other,

he would not lose anything.

Perhaps our fingerprints

touch each other on the handrail. We always

pass her, we go

up or down, we go in, we go out.

This is our space, our

stairway, the rooms in which

we sleep, in which we wake up.

Our dreams, our reality,

ours is also the street outside,

the treetops washed by

the sun, the sights that look us

straight into the eyes.

Only death isn't ours, it occurs to me

as I'm greeting you and smiling at you.

Yes, we belong to it instead, this is death

saying hello with a hardly noticeable

nod - answers to me your smile.


Translated by Dragan Purešić

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