Wednesday, November 16, 2011

.for d Spanish Lunula

Slobodan Nikolić, born in Pančevo, Vojvodina, Serbia in 1980. Graduated from Navy Academy in Belgrade, but received (mostly) honorable discharge from the Serbian Navy. Interested in Psychology, he completed Dream Interpretation and Analysis Course and is soon to become a licensed Dream interpreter. Falls in love easily with cities and women. In cities mostly because of women. Used to be in love with Trieste, Zagreb, Subotica. Writes poetry, short stories and novels. His work was translated in Italian, English and Hungarian. His first novel is to be published this year in Croatia. He won the UNESCO award for poetry in 2011.


READING NERUDA

You are reading Neruda
At 6 o’clock in the morning
After sleepless night
In somebody else’s apartment
In which you already feel at home
In the city you have been calling your
own For a long time
Though you know it is not
Neruda, which you don’t even like to read
(And you refuse to admit
That today, you even
Like some of his poems)
And you know you could write
The most beautiful verses this morning
The greatest love poems of all
And the saddest ones, too
Only to defy Neruda
But you are wondering if it’s worth doing
Without knowing If you’ll ever get the chance to read them
To Her

Zagreb, 2011



INSOMNIA

The night is dawning in my head.
Dreams are perishing in sultriness,
Under the gloomy Sun
Of my fears.
Silence is bestriding me,
It is sitting on my chests.
Eyeless, it is grubbing me up
Through my pupils.
Never to meet
You.
We are never
On the same side
Of eyelids.

Pančevo, 2011


TRIESTE – ZAGREB (- BUDAPEST )

Trains are, they say,
Much more comfortable for long journeys
Than the buses
You can stretch
Stand up
Go to the loo
Have a cigarette
Or sleep tucked in pleasantly
By the grinding in the metal womb of a train
Tonight, while I am waiting,
At the deserted station in Monfalcone,
The train which will only reach
A half of its destination,
I know that the comfort of traveling
Depends solely on
Whether you are leaving
Or arriving

Zagreb, 2011





Maja Klarić was born in 1985 in Šibenik, Croatia. She finished Comparative Literature and English Language and Literature on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb with the thesis on Croatian Contemporary Travelogue. She worked as a translator for numerous newspapers and magazines, a radio program and a publishing house. She writes poetry, prose and essays mostly on the topic of travel. She published her work in all relevant literary magazines and newspapers as well as poetry collections and prose anthologies. She took part in different multimedia-literary events in Croatia and abroad. She was awarded on many international literary contests such as international poetry contest Castello di Duino in Trieste, Italy, international short story contestSea of Words in Barcelona, Spain, international literary festival Aprilskisusreti in Belgrade and international literary contest Ulaznica in Zrenjanin, Serbia. She organizes international Activist Poetry Festival Art Attack, the only such festival in the region.


Traveling people

They begin in a land neither mine nor theirs,
Stories like these.
To be born away from home…

People we meet on the road,
Glimpses of better versions of ourselves,
Shine like stars
When in the night we dream of knowing them better.

First time we met
You were strolling down Barrio Gotico,
But Barcelona remained unuttered.
It took you five hundred kilometers to speak to me,
On a fast train Barcelona-Madrid.

On Puertadel Sol we shook hands
And so it became Kilometre Zero[1] of our story,
The place where all our roads depart from.

Time we spent together: indefinable.
Things you’ve thought me, engraved forever in my swirling soul.

From the moment we part
All that is left are letters sent and roads not taken,
Great odysseys we dream of taking together:
Sailing the sea like Captain Ahab,
Chasing the unfathomable beast,
Climbing mountains covered with spotless snow in December,
Exploring the road like Jack Kerouac.

Lunar dreams like
Us taking the Route 66 in rent-a-car across North America
Listening to Randy Travis or John Coltrane.
Dreams like sailing the Mediterranean
And reading Ithaca on our way back.

In my mind you exist
In form of train stations and announcement boards.
But it’s not only the roads that remind me of you,
It’s every place of departure.
Railway stations, ports and airports,
Staring mute at the horizon
Watching ships and sailors like Baudelaire did.
My front door, my parking spot,
The roads I take when riding my bike,
Imagining I was riding through Athens or Amsterdam,
Or any other city, for that matter.

But the roads between us are jammed
With each day we experience something new
And cannot tell each other about it.
I anticipate we will meet hundreds of other vagabonds like us
And share adventures with them…

Wondering would we feel this close
If we weren’t so far away
You remain
Scribbled in the margins of my travel books.

[1]In many countries, Kilometre Zero is a particular location from which distances are traditionally measured.Spain has its Kilometre Zero in the centre of Puertadel Sol in Madrid.




Cortege of prancing horses*

(inspired by Seamus Heaney’s Funeral Rites)




The day my grandparents told us
They wanted to refurbish the old house
I knew something was amiss

It flooded every crevice in my mind
The silence

All I could think about was
My grandmother's old bed linen
And how it always smelled of dust

All I could do
Was to stare at my shoes
All I could hear
Were my father's heavy tears
Falling on the well-worn floor

The silence consumed the air
Around my grandfather's armchair
And his slippers stood still

And when he died
I didn't say a word

All I could say
Later that day was
Yes I guess
This is for the best


So we gathered wreaths in the front yard
And welcomed friends

My grandmother picked black clothing
My father dressed in the only suit he had
The one he wore on his wedding day
And which he’ll most probably wear on mine

Then all of a sudden
A warm southern
Onerous wind blew
Into the lighted bedroom
And uncovered my grandfather’s white hands
The linen disclosed
His bony fingers
And threw me off quite unexpectedly

The people around me disappeared
And once again
I was alone with the thoughts of me as a child
With thoughts of my grandfather
As a pillar and a bulwark of our small family

I knew I was supposed to cry
But I couldn’t
The misty air
Warm and fair
Silenced my farewell
And we began our ride uphill



* Poem “Cortege of Prancing Horses” was awarded on the international poetry contest “Castello di Duino” in Trieste, Italy, 2008.




Waiting for Godot [2]



You’ve changed the linen because you want the room to smell of laundry detergent.
You’ve changed all the broken light bulbs and the batteries in the TV remote.
You’ve even washed the refrigerator leaving only his favorite food inside.
You’ve thrown away the food that went sour since the last time you did that.
You’ve put on a CD with his favorite music and made a little mess on the kitchen table
So it wouldn’t look like you’ve been preparing too much.
You start at every sound, you wince and you adjust your freshly washed hair.
You sit back, realizing it was just neighbors returning home.
You wonder how long have you been waiting but you don’t want to look at your watch
Afraid it might say that it has been more than only a couple of minutes.
You don’t want to look through the window
Afraid you might find nothing but an empty street
But you find an excuse to do it nevertheless.
Like an addict, you keep saying
One more minute, just one more and then I’ll stop waiting
But still you can’t seem to detach yourself from the armchair.
Suddenly the anxiousness turns into anger and you think
Didn’t I have a life before this?
The one that was only mine and nobody else’s
Before this fruitless apartment cleaning and hapless welcome dinners?
Weren’t I just fine before?
But you discard the thought
Refusing to tackle the issue of happy independence again.
The clock strikes three and it’s already too late.
You change into more comfortable shoes and light a cigarette.
It doesn’t matter now if the living room smells of matches and cigarette butts,
The smoke will clear till tomorrow.

[2]A play by Samuel Beckett


Mitko Gogov aka kihuPotru

youth worker that works with young people from everywhere, push for social inclusion and volunteering. ..as youth trainer provides different creativity workshops as: forum theater, multimedia, stick art, street art, graffiti, use of organic and recycled materials in contemporary art, handmade ..and social aspects as PEER & non-formal education, EVS, youth participation etc..

Conceptual/ multimedia artist with few expos, performances and art installations behind, showed in France, Norway, Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia.. published poet and short stories writer, translated on English, Serbian, Croatian, Italian, Indian [telugu] and Bulgarian.

Active graffiti painter and word as a [dj] with the name Dzamski, specializing in psychedelic trance, dark forest, experimental and ambient sounds.

Blogger, open for communication. #culture #art #media



Prelude. Rebirth

In the traces of the shadows
the tranquility of their silent voices
is vibrating.
Like lost leaves
we are pushing ourselves toward the sky,
…actors that are playing with the wind.

Prelude of the fear
to be still alive.

Decay, earth, ash,
bottles at the end of the coast,
without stopper,
without message

we transforming into particles
somewhere into the Ocean.



Anatomy of warmth

. .
because the codes are scrambled,
because the real thought is replaced by
some seemingly important.
Because we are generated Patriots
of the unwritten history.

That's why we are crumbed dust
forgotten dying star
- Mayan desire to be reborn

Somewhere in the holes of the arteries
we act warm-up
- Such as bricks and glass wool
in electric furnace.

Anatomy of warmth.

I identify myself in every single pore
of the trees,
and look for the center of my home
in the burst dry fields
Then from the lumps I create the planetary system
the universe of hidden groundwater
- My Cosmos.



Dragon and Light


Old dragons are passing away,
new stars are born.

The souls are levitating
between sounds of timelessness.
In our bodies, a universe is hiding,
ready to give a life to the light.

Moments of silent spilling of tranquilly,
the sources are being filled with new dreams,
in the mind, new horizons are germinating.

Crystal dust of the wings
is playing with the humanity.



Dijana Klarić (25) finished Marketing on the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb. She is in photography for approximately 4 years. She won second prize on the Contest for Amateur Photography “Island motifs” with her photo “A slow afternoon on an island”. She exhibited within a common photo exhibition in Trieste during the International Poetry Festival “Castello di Duino”. On the Festival of pop literature Kliker! in Zagreb, May 2008, she presented her project “Poetical postcards” into which she integrated her photographs and the poetry of her sister, Maja Klarić. She published her photography from St. Marco Square in Venice “Fighting for the crumbs of bread” in a travelogue magazine of Croatia Airlines. In the year 2009 her photo collage “Sublime” was published in a prestige photo magazine in London, “Shots Directory Photography”. The same year she had her first independent photo exhibition “Green Odyssey”. Second exhibition “No Direction Home” followed in 2010 as a part of the project of two Klarić sisters “The art of travel”. In May 2011 she opened her third exhibition “450 000 steps to the end of the world” in Zagreb and Šibenik where she presented her pilgrimage “Camino de Santiago” through Spain.



Camino de Santiago

El tiempo pasa_Camino de Santiago



Natural Blues