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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