Leaving Sarajevo
The bus driver stops to pick plums
from an abandoned late summer garden,
the pale blue carrier bags pulled from his bed
where he sleeps underneath the bus.
All night we watch movies,
drink beer in the dark, cross borders
where Bosnians, Croats and Serbs
will read and re-read our passports,
our papers: the litmus test of war.
We travel Prijedor, Banja Luka, Tuzla,
toward an airport light of home;
past mine fields and orchards
fueled by sweet Sarajevan plums
our hearts are no longer our own.
Ghazal for the Woman
from Vitez, Bosnia
It's the best watermelon in the world
but there's no way to say it in words.
She had squatted in the space for apples and pears
under the staircase, a year, beyond the place of words.
Now she comes back with tea, examines me closely,
my out-of-date phrase book, my mispronounced words.
I ask for the toilet and she shows me the bedrooms, bombed
by neighbors who should have known how to use words.
We walk out to her garden in late afternoon light,
survey squash plants and corn stalks, we re-enter words.
In Bosnian the tomato is called paradise, sweetness
transferred from some other country's words.
We drink rounds of whisky, call her sons on the phone
laughing because we have found a way out through words.