Luck in Sarajevo

[osprey_archer]

A poem I stumbled upon (because that is the best way to find poems, in the wild, by means of serendipity). It's very striking.

Luck in Sarajevo

In Sarajevo
in the spring of 1992,
everything is possible:

you go to stand in a bread line
and end up in an emergency room
with your leg amputated.

Afterwards, you still maintain
that you were very lucky.

--Izet Sarajlić, trans. Charles Simic

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm reading (or one of them: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven). It's excellent. And yes--the "everything is possible" being a threat rather than a promise: that figured in the short story I just read, which is the most tragic so far.