We are presenting the English translation of several selected poems from the upcoming poetry collection by Maja Klarić. Some of these poems (cycle entitled "Greece / Water") were written at the literary residency in Larissa in March 2020, where Maja was staying at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

HARBOR

 

Coast Guard ships

Replaced the fishing boats

Because there’s no more room for everyone
 

You are not wanted here

Says the barbed wire

Go back or, better yet, disappear altogether 

Says a concrete wall

Creep into a hole and die

Says a virus designed to

Get hold of the old and the weak first

Then able-bodied men and women

And finally the children

So that the world can still die young

So that in can

Laugh 

In its own face

At the end

SIRENS

In Ulysses Shelter in Larissa*

 

The song of the sirens smashes the ships within you

The very last hope you will ever return

Then and now

Those are two different realities

Now and tomorrow

As distant as two objects

In weightlessness

Close to each other

And eternally separated

Everything that could have happened

If you had covered your ears and resisted

Fades and drowns

By your tiresome arrival

To shelter

Arrival on the shore with no boat

That you could use to depart anew

And continue your journey

You no longer know if the voices of the sirens

Lulled you to sleep or woke you up

If they caress you before

Or after it

They keep telling you that you have returned

That this was your goal from the beginning

But you are not quite sure

If you had arrived

Or simply gave up

 

*In a little house by the Aegean Sea, one of the locations of Ulysses' Shelter residency program.

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