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Best Poems From
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
(March 11,1959)
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1.
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Being Late
From where do simplicity and ease
In the movement of heavenly bodies derive?
It is precision.
Sun is never late to rise upon the Earth,
Moon is never late to cause the tides,
Earth is never late to greet the Sun and the Moon;
Thus accidents are not accidents
But precise arrivals at the wrong right time.
Love is almost never simple;
Too often, feelings arrive too soon,
Waiting for thoughts that often come too late.
I wanted too, to be simple and precise
Like the Sun,
Like the Moon,
Like the Earth
But the Earth was booked
Billions of years in advance;
Designed to meet all desires,
All arrivals, all sunrises, all sunsets,
All departures,
So I will have to be a little bit late.
Dejan Stojanovic
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2.
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Wallace Stevens
The sea was the house and the world was the nave
You were the sea and you were the nave
The nave was stormy, the sea was calm
While the house was waiting for the world
To come in by the navy of the sea
The sea was a nave, the world was a house
You were the nave in the sea—
The house and the world
The world was the navy in the sea
And the sea was the house
Dejan Stojanovic
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3.
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Don Quixote
We dream and fight
With demons real and imagined;
We only live if we dream;
We grow from our dreams,
From our own La Mancha.
Don Quixote is not an imaginary person;
He is as real as Alexander the Great;
His Dulcineaas real as Cleopatra,
His windmills are as real as the Library of Alexandria,
As real as scores of languages dead and forgotten,
As real as Attila, or lost Constantinople.
His windmills are lost Ayah Sofias;
His battles had to be won
By sleepy emperors
Too busy to wage them.
We need Don Quixote and La Mancha.
When the whole past is but a phantom,
When many a city fell,
The idea remained
Stronger than any city, stronger than any empire.
Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso,
From Dally and El Greco,
From the gloomy View of Toledo.
He was born before Cervantes.
Those in Argentina, Mexico and Peru,
Colombia and the Caribbean
Bear La Mancha and Quixote in their hearts
For he is an ultimate and overlooked Don Juan.
Marquez was not born in Colombia.
He was born in Macondo,
And his Macondo is his La Mancha.
Fuentes and Cortazar are from La Mancha too.
Neruda had his first dream,
First meeting with the Moon and the Sun
In sunny La Mancha, hiding in his heart
Where he learned how to sing like a nightingale.
Don Quixote is not just Don Quixote;
La Mancha is not just geography;
It is our personal territory
Terra Nostra.
It is not important what happens where;
Where we fall or rise,
What we conquer or lose,
How big or small we are.
All places come and go.
History will be erased in the universal purgatory.
Dreams are our only geography
Our native land.
Dejan Stojanovic
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4.
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Dream within the Dream in the Dream of Edgar Allan Poe
In the dream, Homer, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Frost meditate in the Kingdom by the sea and want to know if they found Eldorado.
Shall I compare you to the summer's night
My beautiful Anabel Lee?
Shall I take the Road less traveled
In search of Eldorado?
Or shall I compare you to the summer's day
When I seek Eldorado?
Shall I take every road
In search of my Anabel Lee
In this kingdom by the sea?
Shall I find Eldorado in my beautiful Anabel Lee?
Or shall I stop in the middle of the Forest,
In the middle of my journey,
And weep because of Senza Luna
In the Jungle and in my heart?
For I had lost the path that does not stray
'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la dirrita via era smarrita.'
Or shall I remember that
'My soul sang of metamorphoses?
before the sea and lands began to be,
before the sky had mantled every thing,
then all of nature's face was featureless—
what men call chaos: undigested mass
of crude, confused, and scumbled elements,
a heap of seeds that clashed, of things mismatched.
There was no Titan Sun to light the world,
No crescent Moon.'
Shall I dwell in this dark forest?
Or shall I seek the kingdom by the sea to see
'When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more'?
'The true Mother of Romans, joy of gods and men, was born,
the first true woman, Venus, life giver, who under planet and star
visits the ship-clad sea, the grain-clothed land
always. For through you all that's born and breathes
is gotten, created, brought forth to see the sun,
Lady, the storms and clouds of heaven shun you,
You and your advent. Earth sweet magic-maker,
Sends up her flowers for you, broad Ocean smiles,
And peace glows in the light that fills the sky.'
Dejan Stojanovic
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