Yomota Inuhiko-VI

Mitrovica, Kosovo 2004[1]

Tell me,

what is it that’s on the road to the cemetery?

What is waiting for you?

There’s nothing. Only the wind is laughing.

The endless brick wall that’s collapsed.

Dirty, abandoned

the mark of an arrow in white paint.

Duck by the rusted iron fence,

and a muddy, crooked road,

thistles with its worm-eaten leaves

abandoned by the hope of fruition,

flowering as if wanting something over the wasteland.

Here and there, a shoddy house sternly enclosed

by a wooden fence. It is to have the daughters of the house avoid evils.

Daughters holding their breath in the dark like hermit crabs.

With the husk of an automobile abandoned,

at the footsteps of a man trampling on the gravel

field mice scatter all at once.

Arrive at the cemetery and there’s nothing.

The catacomb, burnt down long ago,

has only sooty, dirty fragments of glass scattering on the floor.

Gravestones with embossed angels smashed,

every single dark hole has animal intestines and excrements

wrapped in plastic bags thrown into it.

Get this: Man is never born of

God’s sacred dust.[2]

Man is born of excrement and dies smothered by excrement.

—Well then, what is waiting for you,

in the land with no consolation on its forehead?

Get this: Man can rape

not just a virgin full of shyness.

Man can ravish both death and the stupendous hours of the past.

What’s laughing is not wind, but death.

Our feet tripped by the mud, clothes soiled by the seeds of wild thistles,

we reach, at the end of useless effort,

a clutch of excrement wrapped in a plastic bag.

Only so as to burn our retina with it

we followed the brick wall as if it were a daily task

and headed for a dark hole.

We went dragging our feet.

[1] A violent confrontation occurred between ethnic Albanians and Serbians that was touched off by the drowning of a child, in March 2004.