Srebrne svirale

One can, from vague memories, only extract some clearer images: the earliest, from the summer of 1918, before I was even thirteen, shows me with Ivo Miškin, in Rastušje, in our vineyard, on Marica Hill, from where you can see Brod and the winding Sava, how we would shout to each other all day long, composing poems: in ten-line stanzas, that's known. But at what moments, in that blissful time, was I truly a poet? From spring to autumn, and especially in summer, on Sunday afternoons, as soon as the sun began to lean west, I would climb unnoticed to the flat top of the hill, at the entrance to Rastušje, and there, invisible to anyone, among the pine trees, on the grass, I would stand or walk, or lie on my back, and then think and daydream for hours, until the star Večernjača would appear. Never, later, have I been permeated by endless presentiments of something unsaid, similar to those that filled my heart to the brim then. I believed that I was a poet that no one knew about yet, but that they would find out when my harvest was ripe. Like bees around a hive, thoughts swarmed, one after another, one in front of the other, lifting me from the ground and carrying me to an unknown land. And I did not yet know how to express them in harmonious words. I destroyed all the papers with my poems from that time, until I was fifteen. Long ago. And I started anew, from the autumn of 1920. Since then, through the decades, I have been wringing out my life, young and sweet, mature and bitter, into poems.