MILICA JEFTIMIJEVIĆ LILIĆ

MILICA JEFTIMIJEVIĆ

LILIĆ

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

You are a black Moon that pulls me up

And I, enchanted, am climbing,

You are too present in the absence

We become one through your logos.

I am Lilith, always demanding.

You can come into me only through mind

You know that, and wait for my command.

The door of my innerself are high.

Only by a torch of words you can enter

Into the midst of the lucidity

That agitates my blood,

That embodies the river between us

To wash away our karma

Unseparated in the eternity of a poem,

To hide the midnight sun

That radiates intoxicating, but resisting.

As a black dove, I restlessly

Circle above you, suppress the pain,

Sweetly coo to call you

On the moonlight feast where I will dance

In white, like dervish, my vertiginous dance.

When you turn ready for all,

I will disappear.

TRANSLATION: DENISA KONDIC

MUNCH'S SCREAM

Black angels were hovering

Above his cradle while he was dreaming

Of creating a figure

They were ominously alighting on his face.

Then here was dark night and day

The divinity of Mother's face fell down

And the first Scream was heard.

Once more the black angels were arriving

Waking him up, closing his eyes

Until his sister was gone with them.

And the dark kept spreading

Until the entire Soul became a Scream.

He grew up together with the hell

That blended with his being.

And Father kept watch on him

Almost as bodiless

As the black angels of childhood

Who stifled the screams

Until the muteness started to speak

In the picture named A Scream

Painted by a casual play

Of Destiny

Signed by Munch's hand.

IF YOU ARE GIVEN UP

My death depends on birds' songs

And I have neither home nor name

Now when I escaped a sniper,

A naighbour's knife,

The egged-on horde,

My death is irrelevant

More irrelevant than a vibration of a shadow

Under the Moon

That stands above us all,

For my name does not survive without yours

Neither my pulse is heard without yours

Nor my mind reasons without you,

Oh Kosovo, my bleeding wound.

If you are given up, the prayers

Of Apostles will die out before the Creator,

The all-seeing Tricherousa * will lose her sight

And Dechansky will get his sight back

To see the Evil.

If you are cut off,

We will not heal up like Damascene's arm

For there is no force to join that wound.

If you are given up, oh Kosovo,

We will never be ourselves again

Neither will all the Universe be the same.

TRANSL.LAZAR MACURA

MILICA JEFTIMIJEVIĆ LILIĆ

MILICA JEFTIMIJEVIĆ LILIĆ was born at Lovac near Banjska, Kosovo & Metohija, on August 28, 1953. She graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy in Priština, and won a master's degree in philological sciences at the University of Belgrade. She was a professor at the University of  Priština, and editor on Belgrade TV. She has published the following collections of poems: Dark, Salvation (1955), The Hibernation (1998), The Travelogue of the Skin (2003), and a collection of stories The Subject-matter of the Case (2002). She has also published books of criticism: Poetics of the Premonition (2004), The Epistemological Illuminations (2007), Critical Roots and Ranges (2011), The Exactness of the Secret (2012)…Partenon buildings of stars, (poetry) ,Arka Smederevo , Stari Kolašin,Zbin Potok, 2015…She also writes stories for children which have been published in Children's Papers, Jedinstvo, and other newspapers. She is representedin many anthologies and has many literary awards of national importance  as international...Her poems  and pieces of criticism have been translated into Russian, English, Italian, German, French, Hungarian, Macedonian, Turkish, Swedish, Polish and Arabic....more than 25 languages of world. She was vice President of the Association of writers of Serbia, a member of literary society of writers of Kosovo and Metohija and a member of the Association of Journalists of Serbia. She Lives in Belgrade since 1999.