Poems November 2001
A Serb on a black mountain
Splitting, inarticulate rock:
Roots feeling out the silt in the cracks.
Stunted, arthritic trees thrash
The blue wind, which is pulling at twigs.
A maelstrom of white voices brews.
Ancestral voices woo. They ask me
To bare my neck and remember Tsar
Lazar and his bones. I bow my head.
A white fox tracks a brown dove
Fallen from a fir. It hits.
The bird rises to black claws
In a whir, a broken clap of wings.
It’s a red spill, a shriek, in the snow.
The blood steams. Serbia dreams.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 Number 3, on page 37
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