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The Return To Pannonia*
When I return to the woods by the low rivers, in the rye and the crimson, in the streams, in the reeds, in the bulrushes and in the eyes of the deer, passing through the Bosnian mountains, towards the hyperborean Pannonia, when I return in mud and in fog, in the reeds and in the swamps, in the plains, in the corn and the straw, when I leave behind the angels with their instruments and with flowers in their hearts, the naked beings that lived in the rocks, when I leave behind the coat of arms of the two roses, the ruined olive mill, the horse with the fiery mane that saw me in the nights of self-denial, the wormwood bending from the wind above the bloody Krbava, the spike and the scythe outside the breathless earth;
when I set out recalling in my memory the sharp rock in a hungry youth's bitterness, the sublime rustle of the wind in the pines, the planet Mercury shining near to the sun, the mysterious sadness of the ancient warrior. When I leave the town on the shore of the Croatian sea where the decomposed body of Saint Donatus stood on the Roman square with the sepulchral epitaphs of combatants and lovers, of the disobedient city of King Stephan where still there stands a sign of the death of Kotromanicó close by his son Tvrtko and Vuk; when I leave Casku and Nin : The world will shine in the eyes of the living like on those of the Trojan warriors.
Zlato Tomicic Translated by Nizeteo & Tatum From "This Night " Hamilton *Pannonia is a Roman province which included the territory west of the Danube in today's Croatia and Hungary. |