– for Hamed Efendić
I’ve been two weeks home
and won’t wash my sandals clean.
The mud from your grave, from
your son’s, caked and brown, from where
we stood listening to speeches that day,
after it rained. From where the ground held
bodies beneath (at rest), bodies above (in prayer),
holds questions still. Before arriving to your
house, your widow, your wife, by car
over winding green and villages and fires
lit as some kind of warning, I flew to Sarajevo
and was met by a friend, a handsome poet, Mirsad.
He worked (though he wasn’t paid) at the National
Museum. Driving in from the airport, we stopped
at a light. Two sets of small Roma hands flew inside,
landed along the car’s half-cocked windows—lock,
unlock, lock. And the sun lifted the city’s early fog,
its daily crown of cloud. We walked in the garden,
the curator and I, on gravel paths, in the courtyard.
The museum walls tall, untouched, upright around us.
We walked in the sun through Bogomil tombs
so white they shone. I slept under a wide desk then,
slept jet lag’s unstoppable sleep. On the museum floor,
blackness, no dreams—not as I dream of you now,
gospodin—now home—and the survivors. Nirha,
your girl, a woman. Her husband. Their infant son,
Muhammed, who lived, who lives, who is
all smiles and coos, who knows nothing yet
of what was.
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Lee Peterson is the author of Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia. Her research, writing, and community interests explore issues of human rights, displacement, migration, and motherhood. She teaches writing and works with international students at Penn State’s Altoona campus.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina: 25th Anniversary of Srebrenica massacre is a sombre warning from history
[Amnesty International]
