Maja Kojadinovic

“Let no one reduce to tears or reproach
This statement of the mastery of God,
Who, with magnificent irony, gave
Me at once both books and night

Of this city of books He pronounced rulers
These lightless eyes, who can only
Peruse in libraries of dreams
The insensible paragraphs that yield

With every new dawn. Vainly does the day
Lavish on them its infinite books,
Arduous as the arduous manuscripts
Which at Alexandria did perish.

Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us)
Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens;
I aimlessly weary at the confines
Of this tall and deep blind library.

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East
And the West, centuries, dynasties
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies
Do walls proffer, but pointlessly.

Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade
Explore with my indecisive cane;
To think I had imagined Paradise
In the form of such a library.

Something, certainly not termed
Fate, rules on such things;
Another had received in blurry
Afternoons both books and shadow.

Wandering through these slow corridors
I often feel with a vague and sacred dread
That I am another, the dead one, who must
Have trodden the same steps at the same time.

Which of the two is now writing this poem
Of a plural I and of a single shadow?
How important is the word that names me
If the anathema is one and indivisible?

Groussac or Borges, I see this darling
World deform and extinguish
To a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and oblivion”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Perverse times have come
The mystery of the Beloved to reveal

Crows have begun to hunt hawks,
Sparrows have vanquished falcons.
Horse browse on rubbish,
Donkeys graze on lush green.
No love is lost between relatives,
Be they younger or older uncles.

There is no accord between fathers and sons,
nor any between mothers and daughters.
The truthful ones are being pushed about,
the tricksters are seated close by,
the front-liners have become wretched,
the backbenchers sit on carpets.
Those in taters have turned into Kings,
The Kings have taken to begging.
Oh Bullah, comes the command from the Lord,
who can ever alter His decree?

Perverse times have come,
The mystery of the beloved to reveal”
― Bullhe Shāh

“Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road