Goodbye Bjorn! Goodbye Inger Marie!
If nothing stops I’ll go back to the Telegraph House
but something always stops and here it is,
another van, three mobile phones mounted on the dash.
Miroslav works for a telecom company.
He’s from Bosnia, Srebrenica. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
My family there — woman, three boys.
Wife! Not woman! The oldest in university.
He wants to be an engineer like his father.
We talk of Belgrade, Tito, the war.
I remember looking down on the confluence
of the Danube and the Sava — what’s the name
of that fortress again? Kalemegdan, he says.
Everyone plays tug-of-war with my land.
The Austrians, the Greeks, the Turks.
The vizier built a bridge near my home town,
Mehmed Pasha bridge — ever heard of it?
The Bridge over the Drina?
Yes. I have.
A friend travelled there once,
Frank was reading The Death of Yugoslavia at the time.
In Sarajevo he met an Italian girl,
they hitched together to Pale, then Višegrad,
strange part of the world, he said,
we swung down from the hills and there it was,
like the only reasonable argument in the middle of it all.
Let us pray to Allah that all will be firm against attack,
that existence will flow into happiness.
Mehmed Pasha who built this bridge
blesses it with his eyes.
No one else put up anything in these parts
except concupiscent pricks. Let the patriarch
raise a glass to the rabbi while the vizier
stares at Kandosia’s breasts.
Laurence O’Dwyer | The Gathering of Cabbages
Contents | Mudlark No. 75 (2023)