Sample Poems by Biljana Obradović'

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Haystacks in the Fall
after Vincent van Gogh's Haystacks in Provence, 1880

What difference does it make
whether the haystacks are in Provence
or Kosovo? The pampas or Nebraska?
Golden domes on emptied, dusty fields-
they crown the season's end.

The labor that went into them
remains invisible, as they lie, usually,
out of sight from farmers' homes, unlike here,
where those yellow houses shimmer
in the background. A peasant woman with a bucket

walks around these three stacks of hay.
High ladders still lean on the side
of the one to the right, as if its top
still needs more hay
or to be covered, so the rain

doesn't rot it, or make it unusable
for the cattle that cannot graze
on anything green in the fields for a while
but instead have to be content
with these dried, sweet-smelling

remnants of summer, of the late sun and rain.
Soon, the snow will cover them,
and they, like old men lying in open caskets,
will look like beards sticking upward,
their golden bristles pointing to the sky.

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The Postponed January Appointment

My annual visit to that place, so common for women,
postponed, first by the holiday, the Immaculate
Conception, then by a visit to my lover's mother, struggling
to survive without her husband taken thirteen years
ago, then by the relief, at last, the death

of my mother, after the ten years of breast cancer
that ate her up, like the fall winds-leaves of a tree.
The last two years living with open wounds, puss, bleeding
through the non-adhering bandages I sent her which,
when pulled, led to yet more bleeding, she not able

to wear any blouses without staining them, not
able to walk in public without someone
staring at her missing right breast, her right arm
enlarged, bandaged to conceal the bloody sores,
not able to bathe for a year,

only to wash herself partly beneath
her wounds. (I helped her shower last summer.
Naked, my mother cried from each splash of water.
I cried myself to sleep at night after cutting
her long, gray pubic hair, the long, thick nails

on her enormous right arm, after changing the wet, red
bandages on her arm, after massaging her
hips, after the repeated pain injections created lumps
making it painful to inject more, after cutting her food
into small pieces for her to swallow.) At the end

weighing less than half her weight, after months of
morphine, of hallucinating that people had come
to our house and telling my father to offer them
a copy of my book, she asked him to feed her
poison. He told her there was none in the house.

She asked the doctors to administer
something to put her to sleep forever. She wanted
the pain to end forever. And her wish came true
as the sun rose on the first day of the new
year, the last of the century, the millennium. Today,

I update my doctor of her death. He remembers me
from last year, but not my ethnicity.
"Catholic?" he asks. "Eastern Orthodox," I tell him.
He has read Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
and wants to know as he prods me down there,
will I ever want to have children? He checks
my breasts. It's never too late, he adds,
now that even older women can have them.
But, because I still smoke, approaching forty,
I cannot use birth control pills, as I can get a stroke.

If I decide to have a child I increase the chance of getting breast
cancer
myself. He says he has quit smoking. Maybe I can too.
Should I risk fate, and get pregnant, or should I remain
without? Have my brother and I killed Mama?

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Tumors

"Give me your breast, Mother,"
someone behind me says on the 95 bus,
repeating the sentence as if in a child's voice
several times, as if a joke, loud enough
so everyone turns around.

Whispers, then silence. No one dares
confront him. He asks again, as if
a child, "Give me your breast, Mother.
Father give me your hose." A child only thinks
that if he says the names of sexual organs aloud
he will make us feel embarrassed, disgust.

Why not just say vagina, penis, fuck?
We have been fucked! Why not just say it?
Why continue the silence, the hush-hush
attitude? Why not speak our minds?
How long can we endure this pain, saying nothing?
How long not see what has happened?

The young man speaks the truth. He is not mad.
The country is mad. Who wouldn't be crazy?
I am still sane, I hope. I walk the city
I used to know. My best friends tell me
to leave, never to come back. Never.

My mother's right breast long gone
but her left remains. She wants to die,
but she's still here. Even with all her pain,
she endures. Her wounds seem to heal, then
bleed. The puss exudes an awful stench, just as
the country does. On the walls of the city I read,

graffiti: "Sign-Cancer. Descendant-tumor."
Her cancer, the country's cancer. South of us
is a war. People are dying every day.
Young soldiers, serving their country, die.
Policemen die. Terrorists die. Families are displaced.
We will not let go of Kosovo, the cradle of the Serbs.

Politicians pronounce. People utter. The West supports
the terrorists. We're not Ireland, not Anglicans.
The Schiptars are mostly Moslem, but Catholic too.
The Croatian Catholic Stepinac will become a saint
(Vatican just announced) for helping to kill hundreds
of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews.

I don't want to be baptized.
I believe in the goodness of my mother.
Even the spot that used to be a breast, filled with
puss, soaked with blood is more dear.
I would rather suck that breast.
"Give me your breast, mother!"

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Mammalcide
for Greg Shade

In England they want to kill cows,
millions of innocent animals which
may have mad cows' disease, but may not.
Countries all over the world volunteer,
their way of saving them perhaps.
Cambodians say they could be brought
to their war-torn country to walk in the countryside,
set-off millions of mines laid
everywhere to kill their own-they'd save children now, people.
Indians, whose religion prohibits the slaughter of cows,
the eating of beef, call upon the British
to bring them to India, build a sanctuary to worship these sick cows
with only a third of the money they'd use to destroy them,
-they are sacred, they represent motherhood.
One should not kill that which gives us milk from its breasts.

Innocent, like our cabana tenant,
who cooked at an Italian restaurant, feeding people,
until late that night, parking his car on the street
in front of the house as almost every night,
he got shot in front of the gate before
opening it, by two teenagers
who pretended to ask what time it was,
then pulled out a gun, trying to mug him, then shot him
in the elbow, the ricocheting bullet ending in his back.
A random victim, he survived. Thank God.
His mother tends to her wounded son, the hero.
In Latin mamma is a breast; mammals
should not kill other mammals.
It is a mad disease.