HETHA B

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HB!

You share your birthday with Vasko Popa. Popa was a 20th century Serbian modernist poet, famous for developing a unique poetic language in which symbolist poetry is merged with the characteristic vocabulary of oral folk traditions. His style is concise and succinct, often elliptical, and saturated with humour. Vasko Popa spent time in a concentration camp during World War II. He was born in 1922 and died in 1991. Here is a sample of his work.

Poem no. 22 from the "Far Inside Us" collection

Our day is a green apple
Cut in half

I look at you
You don't see me
There's a blind sun between us

On the stairway
Our torn-apart hug

You call me
I don't hear you
There's deaf air between us

In the shop-windows
My lips seek your smile

On the crossroads
Our run-over kiss

I've given you a hand
You don't feel it
The void has given you a hug

On the city squares
Your tear seeks my eyes

In the evening my dead day
Meets your dead day

Only in a dream
Do we walk in the same fields

:D