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Milorad Pejić
ANTE TOPIĆ MIMARA
You dealt with things; people radiate nothing.
As your property multiplied (also our poverty),
the pundits met to consider how and with whose
help you had acquired so much in the wide world.
Thus with your blood cooling with the years, your
homesickness boiled down to an elementary yearning
for the forests, the sea, and the stone. From time
to time a drunken wind would waft the scent of linden
into your room, crawling all over your antiques like
an infant.
When, departing this life, you left your line of work,
for a long time packages kept on arriving at your
vacant address and shipments continued to be sent out.
Order had been upset and dusts mixed up, but here in
the wide world I came to understand your genius: you
sold expensively things you’d bought cheaply. My soul,
however, is cooling: I rummage through my photo albums
less and less often. My thirst for that country I slake by
leafing through tourist guides.