Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Milorad Pejić

KALEMEGDAN I

With the gurgling of the vine on the ramparts you don’t hear the silence of powder magazines and dungeons, you don’t feel the draft of corridors of long ago in whose labyrinths only the keyholes are still roaming. I stayed there long, imprisoned outside, looking for disguised entrances. On old men’s benches I listened to the stone for days. At night, when the shadows turn into chasms, and when on the edges of lawns open wells multiply, I would step under the dull light bulbs following the trail of a mole. Now when my youth that I feared would pass in vain has passed in vain, a minute point in the mountain, I’m digging up fountains and building wells, striving toward the same: endurance. Listening to the distance of water I sometimes catch the murmur of the living grave, Kalemegdan. And I think from there. From that place, through my wounds like through the eyelets of the truck tarp during the ride, from the darkness I look.

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