Gordana Benić
Gordana Benić Poems
The city stopped at the point of my pen. And power multiplied like steps on a smooth dancefloor. And the evening's necklace, like eyes strung on the track of the dark, began to rustle.
Meshed summers behind the doors of houses and inhabitants from quiet shadows sensed this prismatic joy in the bready warmth of the sun and deaf peace of the rain.
...
Vulcan's black lizard of Jabuka Island, volcanic Avalon, shapeshifts into a malignant reptile's mobile body, a long-legged bird, membrane of a butterfly and snail. Carved in a dark hour from crooked craters overgrown with greyed grass. As the worm bores into the apple.
...
Nothing in this room is mine.
When I close my eyes the walls move apart, slant
into thin surfaces; so quickly do they change.
...
Sometimes ships are greater than houses,
brighter than streets. Cracks in the walls draw them together
to the city's innermost, disperse them to the beach.
...
All four quarters of the world begin from an occult
groundplan.
The sketch of the inverted city is like
a chessboard. In black-and-white fields
...
And Theseus sails to harbour in the midst of the open sea.
The continents have pushed the ocean back, the islands erased
like pallid grass in the vestibules of abandoned
...
Angel Emanuel saw there was Moon no more, no birth, no life, no death
The souls of the dead dwell in gardens, among the ants. They are the elder gardeners in the rainforests
...
In the August of 1999 Marion Frua said: The moon set off, slowly
devouring the sun
The images have gone missing: said Ann Callis. Someone was heard, playing the violin, through the black hole of a negative shadows fell from things
...
Gordana Benić Biography
Poet and journalist Gordana Benić was born in Split in 1950. She attended grammar school there, and then studied in Zadar, where she read Croatian literature and philosophy, completing her postgraduate studies in literature in Zagreb. She lives and works in Split, where she writes on the arts for Slobodna Dalmacija, the local paper, as she has done for many years, concentrating on historical monuments. In 2000 she received the Vicko Andrić conservation award for her articles on national historical monuments.)
The Best Poem Of Gordana Benić
Stairway
The city stopped at the point of my pen. And power multiplied like steps on a smooth dancefloor. And the evening's necklace, like eyes strung on the track of the dark, began to rustle.
Meshed summers behind the doors of houses and inhabitants from quiet shadows sensed this prismatic joy in the bready warmth of the sun and deaf peace of the rain.
It happened at a troubled hour when all that is red pales, when all that yellow quietens, when every shadow rests on the oars and sails, and when a darkened track hovers over all, for no clear reason.
And I recognised at once that condensation of violet. Of course I did: in place of the edge of the sky a city had stopped at the point of my pen.
And I watch it, and I watch myself, standing here at the edge of the table, and my gaze is a border of lights and of angles, intricate and lazy, because it belongs to me; while roofs and towers come down the darkened corridor, islands and seas come, sounds and city-squares come. While the I go by.
Translation: 2007, Kim Burton
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