Zupan Uroš:
Cosmology Of The Birth Of The Poet

From the red-hot magma, its already congealed layers,

from the great emptiness of silence on the ocean bed,         

from the submerged temples of Atlantis, from the

petrified forests of sea grass, the stillness of the Arctic

ice, from the immeasurable depths of thought,

its invisible hands,

roaming through space like burning comets, from the

Tibetan

Book of the Dead, from long breaths of life recreated,

I ascend. Millennia have flourished and faded in the

prism

of my gaze. The blare of jet planes merges with the

Palaeolithic yells of

naked hunters. Branded by time that has passed  I drift

on its

fluid river. I sit under a mango tree like gentle Buddha.

High in the

palm of the sun I climb pyramids and kill,

bloody-handed, with the conquistadors.

I wander through the halls of Cortez’s dream.

I stretch across the Palestinian sky, over the continents,

like Christ’s

passion. What I breathe as I swim towards the surface

must

be air. Perhaps I walk and ascend the  Babel  tower of

the world.

Astral bodies fall from me and  return to me. I multiply

like a protozoa.

I’m both a man and a woman now.

Now I’m the gentleness

of late summer rain, I’m the famine and the hurricane,

which carries off  houses and kills people.

I’ve never been merely one.

I was Hiroshige’s waves and his wind, I was the flame

in burning Rome, an arrow at the Crusades and

the explosion of a bomb over the endless dunes

of Normandy. At first

I was frightened, having seen myself as the Satan

of Blake’s imagination.

I was scared when I caused the first earthquake.

Now I’m

calm and unafraid, I let the cascades of time break

against me, I let

multitudes make love and hate in me, and blood does

not stream

through my veins, light flows through my arteries and

darkness down my veins,

and like a bolt of thought I break my way through the

membrane

of water, the membrane of air, and inhabit

the skull of a sated

beast. My back is protected by millennia. I watch my

mirror

image of the beast and in silence wait calmly

for a new time of hunger.