Sonja Manojlovic [Croatia]

 

Not  Everyone is Friedly to You 
(Nisu ti baš svi skloni)
 
Not everyone  is friendly to you, as you think,
the world is unfriendly place.
 
But I have no other family.
 
Do you hear the summer screams?
 
Yes, they  descend on  our garden,
pluck  heads,
they swallow  oxygen
and all our babuskhas
they will disappear forever like pets
through the bush in the corner of our garden

 
 
 
And It Isn’t Allowed 
(A to se ne smije)
 
You smile, even without a collocutor, with your eyes,
into space, into a volcano’s crater, to a human face
which should be loved
 
only not to their market-places, not to shadowy places
where things and people lose their names
 
it’s there that shadows of smiles fly over human shadows
 
You walk through the city, looking into their eyes,
and it isn’t allowed
You break the door apart and enter, the mouth smiles of its own accord,
the mouth does its job – let’s drive the weak ones crazy!
For the lower jaw is willing and willing
Since when do you know that, from the whisper, from the suppressed smile?
The feeling which precedes the word
plays itself out immediately
You don’t speak, it’s not in words
the infant flung into the air
 
 
 
Big Celebrations Are Not For Me 
(Za mene nisu velika slavlja)
 
Big celebrations are not for me,
one goes mad in the scene, nothing better comes my way,
it blazes eternally,
and the bites of tiny birds on one’s auricles are carried home
 
Now I recognize my feelings
a rebound in the shared bowl,
I’m thinking in images
– you may feel, you may not do,
 
and there’s nothing to stop
the general conversation,
boredom is just the rhythm
of dehumanization
 
Listen,
I’m someone else,
I think I know him,
he lives in high mountains,
a cloud, slipped away from others, sometimes lights him up,
a lazy fog, colorless world
 
 

Author’s Bionote: 

*Sonja Manojlović was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1948 and graduated with a degree in philosophy and comparative literature from the University of Zagreb. She has published 23  poetry books (the first one in 1965). Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies and translated into more than 20 languages,  including books of selected poems in English and French online and in Polish and Romanian published in Warsaw and Bucharest. She has been the recipient of numerous literary awards, among them the Award for Excellence in Poetry in Greece, India, Japan and Russia such as for her overall contribution to Croatian poetry.  All her life she worked as a free lance writer  - as an editor on the radio, in magazines and newspapers and for years as the General secretary of the Croatian Writers Society. She participated in many large international poetry festivals: Columbia - Medellin, Venezuela - Caracas, Nicaragua- Granada, India - Bhubaneswar, Indonesia, North Macedonia - Struga Poetry Evenings, China - Qinghai Lake Poetry Festival, Russia - Tver, France - Lodeve, Greece -Mediterranean Poetry Festival (Larissa), Uzbekistan,.etc