A Deathless Moment.

Hadziselimovic, Omer

A Deathless Moment

 A sniper is working a street crossing.
 Two girls, breathless from running across.
 They radiate heat, perfumed, like silk
 underwear being ironed. One of them doesn't have a hairdo,
 but bristling wheat sprouts on her head. She's fuming, thundering,
 and cursing at the sniper: I seem to be watching, as if out of a
 window,
 a glorious storm! The other's words are pleasant
 like the fluttering of an umbrella, in the morning, at the Budva
 beach.
 She tosses her head from time to time. For our sake!
 For she knows: with each toss, her long hair will smell sweetly.
 A beauty. But one of those who never
 fail to smile at you. Both lavishly and stingily.
 Lavishly enough to make you happy. Stingily enough
 that it costs them nothing. Their smile
 lets you know that for them you are not a thing among things.
 They wish perhaps to break the spell put on you
 by an icy female look that has turned you into a thing.
 The air smelled sweetly of my youth of long ago
 when every tree-lined lane led to the end of the world.
 When life was not yet worn thin like a proverb.
 They left, leaving in me the tenderness
 that comes over you when you look long at the skies
 swarming with snowflakes.
 They went, chattering--not two girls, but two breezes, blowing
 suddenly
 through scorching heat of the siege. Through the dog days of
 existence.

 (from The Polish Cavalry, 2002)