The Danube

The year is 2021. We have been greeted by a plague. Many did not see it coming. This, the vulnerability of man. We are simple creations. Otherwise we would not be warring. Men amongst men. Turning against their own brothers – and for what? What have we ever accomplished through war, televised images of constant bombardment that haunts cities and changes the perspective of men? What have we been aspiring to claim? To oust? Only ourselves. We will return to the soil but we forget that we came from the stars. We send armies into regions and only skeletal matter remains. Some are found and they are given honourable funerals where pain can never be omitted. Yet there are tens of thousands of stories that remain unarchived in the soil. They have returned to the earth and the perpetrators who live in the presence of their crimes will never be at peace. In this life nor the next. Sniper fire from city roofs. Ricocheting off buildings. The melody of the city night. The accustomed national anthem of mourning. Here they have bled. It is seen on their flags as a red treasure. The dead are the blood symbols of martyrdom. Murdered for who they were and who they would become. The love for your own nation can be often seen as damaging to a population, but how can we not have love for a country we were born in? Where as children we saw the visual representation of what it is to be human. The surrounding beauty of what has been created. And we continue to disintegrate cities into rubble. Violence has a way of creating its own worlds. Its effects are innumerable, to the point where it continues to replicate form. We created our own cities, first in the image of the sun. Then came the spiritual renaissance, the birth of an orator who spoke in the language of the divine. So we created metropolises in the image of God. Men who once hid behind the presence of the sun found refuge and sanctity in something greater. They became perilous. False prophets emerged as witnesses testified to the crucifixion of a man who translated the poetry of God. Where do you think our words emerge from, if not the inner light? From the prophets, to the philosophers. From the poets to the people. I never studied literature. I was a commendable student at best. Yet these words flow through me as though I am a soul in the Danube River – escaping from the sound of artillery; from the lakes where bodies of war submerge. 

War part II

Each year we would visit the graves of family members who had passed. Some would congregate beside tombstones, others picked at the overgrown plants that had risen, as bones nourished the soil in which they now reside. In the West graveyards are usually pristine, places where the eyes do not falter. But in this land death has a way of deepening senses. The art of faces, perishing into the past. In the West the dates between birth and death are not often surreal, yet here in this blood immersed land they glare below a sun that states the abrupt endings of life. 1989-1999. 1975-1999. 1980-1999. These were the years where the youth had no knowledge of what peace had to offer. They witnessed their fathers leaving their homes at noon to protest arm in arm. Marching unarmed towards militarised units and tanks with the capacity to crush their bones, sweep them to the side as if they were dust. And who would these policemen answer to, for inhumane crimes? Not a single prosecutor. They were immune to a colonial disease that eviscerated the soul of my people. The taste of teargas was food in which they offered; bullets were the currency of the state. Professors, doctors, intellectuals were all assigned as criminals, in their eyes. Neighbourhoods turned into secret havens, where men risked their lives to teach language that God had bestowed upon them. The human right to express a DNA, an identity, their lineage. Women and men wandered the curfew streets like spies in order to sustain an existence. Children traumatised before they had even learned to read or write. Maybe this was their plan all along, to silence us by ways of illiteracy and dependence. Yet we defied. Professors, activists, civilians and students became unarmed soldiers, their intellect was the armour of silent warfare. The regime’s archives will have you believe that guerrillas were responsible for the commencement of the war. In truth, this war had begun decades before. When they suppressed our language, fearing that words were the power to encapsulate wisdom. When they removed intellectual men from their positions of work and degraded them into becoming second-class citizens, knowing that their honour and obstinance would leave trails of sweat on bedsheets, along with terrors of the night. They carefully alienated an entire generation that had lived in peace during the years of Josip Tito. Albanians and Serbs had lived as one until ultra-nationalism became a serpent within the empire. My evidence is in experiences faced during the war. My father’s life was spared, by a Serb who had recognised him during the years in which they played professional football in the Yugoslav leagues. Those who profess of an intractable history, do not see or recognise or even acknowledge these instances of heart and flesh. They do not see the surface of human connection from their high castles where they plot and sharpen their philosophies of division as they plan the arraignment of innocent men. We cannot claim that every Serb was a warmonger, seeking to devour all that stood in his path. Just as we cannot forget the atrocities carried out by paramilitary forces as they ransacked villages, like Roman barbarians; burning houses and lining men and young boys across brick walls to massacre them without reason, nor reflection. Throughout human history powerful men with a lust for dominion have altered the fates of innocent people as if they were Gods. What they cannot see: is their ultimate destruction, their time usually comes. Either by guillotine or human justice. It surely comes. And the agency is returned to the intellects, the professors and the doctors, to the farmers and village-men who have worked the lands and terrain for centuries. They know a wild animal with a thirst for blood when they see one. The tyrants mistook their hospitality, respect and honour; for weakness. Within their creation is the will to protect their lands and their neighbours from hostile and murderous men, who speak nothing but the literature of violence and death. 

Since The Beginning Of Nada

Humankind’s knowledge, or adversely, it’s unawareness of its minimal importance has inflated the egos of non-virtuous men. This has opened the gates of greed and social loathing amongst a populace that drowns in a wave of social discontent and economic slavery. The patterns of enslavement have evolved over time, metal chains no longer cause contusions, though the shackles remain incorruptible. They cannot be physically removed as the torture is welded deep in the consciousness of the people who have been programmed like machines to honour the abuse of power and stay silent in times of political upheaval. The dictators of this world are men who stand side by side amongst herds of humans, whilst habitually failing to listen to their heartfelt insecurities and injustices. Portraying inauthentic smiles and waves as partisan crowds rise in hysteria. They are given life by the growth of political fragmentations as the dissolving nature of cohesion erodes the mountains of tolerance that have slowly disintegrated over time. Prosperousness grounds those gravitating beings who are propelled towards the stars. For this earth is designed to teach the lost souls a lesson. A lesson that is required in order to flutter across galaxies. Each singular experience is a less than minuscule segment of the universes overall potential and might. The galaxies are eternal, the possibilities are far beyond endless. With intellect – there is overwhelming growth as the mind is a replication of the universe. It is a divine entity that brings us closer to the holy grail of the meaning of existence. Life is a bond, for the noble or the peasant and through war and violence the spiritual vitality of man has been subdued into silence. Division, the prognosis in a feverish world that remains ill, yet refutes treatment. Schisms exclude the common good which strives to repair the splinters that have crippled our people, as rulers produce derailing potions that send the locomotives of humanity crashing into the pits of despair. Some may argue that war and disharmony are merely reflections of the disorder associated with outer space. In the external walls of earth, destruction is inevitable. The universe is a theatre of unmanageable struggles, a maddening cauldron. It cannot control its internal strife that creates intolerable fractions. Human beings – unlike stars – are capable of controlling and avoiding their self-annihilation. Preserve and pay homage to the beauty of existence, for everything that passes with air is an example of how far we have come since the beginning of nada, on a platform in the midst of cosmic conflict.