Milica Jeftimijević Lilić, Serbia

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Milica Jeftimijević Lilić was born at Lovac near Banjska, Kosovo & Metohija, on August 28, 1953. She graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy in Priština, and won a master's degree in philological sciences at the University of Belgrade. She was a professor at the University of Priština, and editor on Belgrade TV. She has published the following collections of poems: Dark, Salvation (1955), The Hibernation (1998), The Travelogue of the Skin (2003), and a collection of stories The Subject-matter of the Case (2002). She has also published books of criticism: Poetics of the Premonition (2004), The Epsistomlogical Illuminations (2007), Critical Roots and Ranges (2011),

The Exactness of the Secret (2012) … Partenon buildings of stars, (poetry), Arka Smederevo, Stari Kolašin, Zbin Potok, 2015…

She also writes stories for children which have been published in Children's Papers, Unity and other newspapers.

She is represented in many anthologies and has many literary awards of national importance as international... Her poems and pieces of criticism have been translated into Russian, English, Italian, German, French, Hungarian, Macedonian, Turkish, Swedish, Polish and Arabic....more than 25 lenguages of world.

She was vice President of the Association of writers of Serbia, a member of literary society of writers of Kosovo and Metohija and a member of the Association of Journalists of Serbia.

Lives in Belgrade since 1999.

Email: milicalil@yahoo.com

Translated from the Serbian by Lazar Macura           

                                 

THE TOUCH OF THE UNIVERSE

For B.

All of me got into that look

Unpredictably, casually,

Almost by fate

Like into a cloak enveloping all.

That look embraced me

Cautiously, primordially,

And the warmth flew through my mind.

For a moment the World turned blue

Like a newly discovered cove,

It got an innocent expression

And stopped being evil.

Awaked by that look, my being

Beamed with joy suspecting a sunny waterfall,

The necessity of blending with the Other,

The fulness expressing the meaning,

The readiness to

Scream out the Existence.

Somewhere, due to that flash,

An almond tree, mute of waiting, burst into blossom,

A restless yellow water lily

Calmed down.

Two isles approached each other

Carried by a strange stream

As if they had been one whole

Before the Flood.

The thought longing from a spark flamed up

Heidegger, Nietzsche, Florensky,

They all happened to be in the game unexpectedly,

And only the hands venturing the touch,

Denying words, knowledge,

Victoriously touched the Universe

Taking down the tattoo of the mind.

THE COSMIC INDISPENSABILITY

To a Philosopher

So important to me,

You will never understand

Something very simple,

Like the crash of thunder

Emptying the skies,

My violent run after you.

Surrounded by a host of bodies

Full of beauty and passion

Inviting you wherever you go,

You did not recognize the thought,

You who descend to the foundations

Did not understand her scream,

And she longed for the echo,

For your confirmation.

You wise, experienced one, full of everything

Like a too mellow fruit,

Did not recognize that it was

The hunger of the Soul for the Other,

The vacuum of a Being gaping

With the incurable emptiness.

You saw the woman and her desire,

The things seen by the ignorant as well,

And you should have

(You know very well what)

Discerned the spirit getting ahead

Squeezed by the matter –

You should have aided it to flash!

And wherever you came

Guided by your senses and mind,

Whatever depths of knowledge you reached

You missed something so obvious.

So important to me –

Were you not because of yourself,

But because of myself.

My road kept going on.

You were the point of the ascent

From where one can see more,

And regardless of your smiles or silence,

I had to climb up

Deprived of your hands,

Supported by my own force.

The thought I was making you of

Keeps extending, dragging me ahead,

That is the cosmic indispensability,

Like our encounter, determined by it.

You were so important to me –

To the person looking for salvation

Pushed from the abyss of life

Not into your beautiful face,

To me, an exalted woman in love.

  

A MOMENT OF REALITY

While enveloped by the Moon and grazed by death

You dream about a far-away shore that is not

Conquered in your absence

I have too little of you,

More than he has me

He who suffers from admonishing longing,

From the jealousy that makes him a beast,

He sharpens his sense of being threatened

And feels the danger like a beast and knows:

You have become the center –

You have sheltered all of me,

You have pulled me into yourself.

You have, like Zeus on Mount Olympus,

Assumed all the power and hidden me.

In vain does he give birth to me like to Aphrodite

I am not where he left me

To be waiting for the promised waking.

And you just turned up suddenly

Like a stray bullet and drove into me,

Anchored in my Soul you radiate devastatingly,

And the removing of the bullet would be fatal.

The entire system of existence became disrupted,

Everything was changed hit with that shot.

My blood flow, poisoned, is clotting up

Well, I am stubbing toward myself

To come back to the same road…

And you wandering under the old walls

To reach the new heights

Do not turn around

For the scene of unbearable emptiness

The abysses of my essence

Will appall you.

Filled with the mercy of the moment

Neither you nor I

Wonted it.

Translated by Lazar Macura

Setu, July 2018