Srebrne svirale

One can only extract some clearer images from one's hazy memories: 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 River, how we would shout to each other throughout the day, 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 imperceptibly 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 think and daydream for hours, until the star Večernjača appeared. Never, later, have I been permeated by endless presentiments of something unsaid, similar to those that filled my heart to the depths 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 off 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 my life into poems, young and sweet, mature and bitter.