Marko Bašić is in over his head

with two Balkan and two World wars.

This is his fifth.

Me and my generation—the second.

Even for Vladimir,

at eighteen months old,

in this moment one can say

half his life

has been carried out in war.

In early spring

I was—

when Sarajevo was still communicating via mail

with the rest of the world—

informed by the translator poet Juan Octavia Prenz,

and his publisher Omar Lara, also a poet,

that the Spanish edition of my book

was going to be released in Chile.

If it was

some Chilean reader might now be asking:

What about the author?

What’s become of him?

He’s sitting in a cellar,

gathering wood,

setting fire to the balcony,

starting a war journal

and dreaming of three scrambled eggs.

On the soccer pitch

a boy

strums his guitar;

overhead

a grenade flies in from Poljina.

Could he become Sarajevo’s own Bulat Okudžava?

Young man,

just focus on staying alive.

Art,

which for me was everything once,

art is,

trust me,

totally unimportant.

For Zija Kafedžić

To survive all this—

besides these verses,

twelve, fifteen people have helped me,

ordinary people,

saints of Sarajevo,

that before the war I barely knew.

The State also showed a certain understanding

of my trouble,

but whenever I knocked on her door,

She was unavailable—

or in Geneva

or in New York.

For Mustafa Cengicnek

We are

former Yugoslavs

subject to extinction

by a strain of the former

Yugoslav army.