DUSKA VRHOVAC

DUSKA VRHOVAC

MOONLIGHT

Loneliness does not fade in the moonlight.

By that primal candle

fades only our unstable character

stooping over loneliness

wanting to portray it as a mystical moment

chosen and embraced voluntarily.

But the smell of iodine in the air warns.

The depth of breaths give us away

and we and this rich night in the distance

turn into cosmic pain

instead of the wax seal

which seals the important messages.

Pain thickens in the moonlight

Hands look for each other

as they are not twins

but strangers from another planet.

Not the smell of sea water

Nor the substantial iodine can help it there.

In the night of moonlight everything opens

and releases abstained traces

unfinished kisses

and easily broken dreams.

Not even the tide or ebb can do anything.

In the night of moonlight only love helps.

MAY BE IT EXISTS SOMEWHERE

May be it does exist somewhere

Harmony, Sense and pure Feeling

but here where you dropped me, Lord,

to pluck  my days, I did not find them.

In this night of white peacocks and thoughts of jade

the wind tore the notes of my melody.

My soul grew tired and my heart clenched

listening to the old signs of recognition.

Your note screeched, dear, spent

like ozone in an industrial city, unnoticeably.

The tide which rises at the thought of you

That tremor which transports me into the other, mild wind,

all of it looks like dispersed fog this night

looks like belated spring in an overgrown garden

like dying colour of a blue violet in a forest clearing

or the bud of a cultivated rose in summer drought.

If you know the words of dodolas which bypassed our land?

if you know the mute code of dew frozen in its fall

look at me and pronounce that splendid thought about happiness

which is stuck by fear in your throat for a long time.

Or, maybe, you and me, we all, are a like.

THE NET

This is the net of your dreams.

When your name rang in my ears

like April rain on the roofs of Paris

which flooded the time of my longing

when, in your night, shut in a cold

and half-imagined reality of a province

you trembled so much that my screen shook

and the milk of liquid crystal overflew

and soaked this hot Belgrade night

with yet another deceitful feeling of eternity

that is the moment this brittle unreal love

was born thanks to the new technologies.

You burst into my life with the heat of the ripe summer

as if you could save yourself only in its glow and you

immerged yourself in it completely like a fetus in a womb’s water

overtaking my bloodstream and the rhythm of my heart.

But this net is only a network of your dreams –

mine are spread over the nets which are primeval

and no technology could be rescued from being sunk by them.

Only an un awakened heart could catch them with ease.

DUSKA VRHOVAC

DUSKA VRHOVAC, poet, journalist and translator, was born on March 24, in 1947 in Banja Luka,  Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She graduated comparative literature at Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, where has been living and working since. Currently  she works as a writer and freelance journalist. She has worked as a journalist for many years at the  Belgrade Television station (Radio Television of Serbia) and  with major national newspapers. With more than 20 published books of poetry, some of which have been translated, in part or in full, into more than 20 languages (English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Romanian, Polish, Turkish, Armenian, Albanian, Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Azerbaijani), she is among the most significant contemporary authors of Serbia and beyond. Present in newspapers, literature journals  and anthologies of absolute value, she has participated in many gatherings, festivals and literary events  in Serbia and abroad. She has received important awards and recognitions for poetry, including: Majska nagrada za poeziju -May prize for poetry- 1966, Yugoslavia; Pesničko uspenije -Ascension of Poetry- 2007, Serbia; Premio Gensini -Gensini Prize- Poetry Section, 2011, Italy; Naji Naaman's international literary prize for complete works - 2015, Lebanon, Beirut; Plaque and medal with the figure of Sima Matavulj, founder and first president of the Serbian Writers' Association - 2016, for the overall contribution to the literature; and the gold medal for the “generosity, dedication, perseverance and creative contributions that are made to spread the culture of the nationalities“, assigned by the Institution for Culture and Education of the Republic of Serbia. Duška Vrhovac is a member, among others, of the Association of Serbian writers (Vice President of the Board for International Relations), Association of Literary Translators of Serbia, of the International Federation of Journalists, and she is Ambassador to Serbia by Poets of the World (Movimiento Poetas del Mundo) and the current Vice President for Europe.