Kuzey

“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo

After the hours that Sarajevans pass
queuing with empty canisters of gas
to get the refills they wheel home in prams
or queuing for the precious meagre grams
of bread they’re rationed to each day,
and often dodging snipers on the way,
or struggling up sometimes eleven flights
of stairs with water, then you’d think the nights
of Sarajevo would be totally devoid
of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,
but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case –

The young go walking at stroller’s pace
black shapes impossible to mark
as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark
in unlit streets you can’t distinguish who
calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh.
All take the evening air with stroller’s stride
no torches guide them, but they don’t collide
except as one of the flirtatious ploys
when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s.

Then the tender radar of the tone of voice
shows by its signals she approves his choice.
Then match or lighter to a cigarette
to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.

And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed
beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test
and he’s about, I think, to take her hand
and lead her away from where they stand
on two shell scars, where, in 1992
Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
lay on this pavement with the broken dead.

And at their feet in holes made by the mortar
that caused the massacre, now full of water
from the rain that’s poured down half the day,
though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away
leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky
ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye
in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees
fragments of the splintered Pleiades,
sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells
splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.

The dark boy-shape leads dark girl-shape away
to share one coffee in a candlelit café
until the curfew, and he holds her hand
behind AID flour-sacks refilled with sand.”
― Tonny Harrison