Footprints Read online

  FOOTPRINTS

  Poetry

  and threads of a poetical impression

  RIFET BAHTIJARAGIC

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  ©

  Copyright 2008 Rifet Bahtijaragic.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

  Edited by: George Payerle

  Cover Artwork by: Bill Hoopes

  Painting: “Shoot to the Moon”

  Translated from “The Bosnian” by: Sanja Garic - Komnenic,

  Dennis Dehlic

  Andrew Grundy

  ISBN: 978-1-4251-7368-5 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4251-8303-5 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4251-7370-8 (e)

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

  and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

  Trafford rev. 04/02/2019

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  toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

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  To my three special ladies: wife Norma,

  daughter Blanca Bahtijaragic-Hoopes

  and granddaughter Una Bach

  CORPUS DELICTI

  I apologize to my readers for potential

  error, since this material hasn’t

  so far been scientifically finalized and argued

  on the bases of empirical evidence. If somebody finds

  any of my claims, spatial and temporal locations incorrect,

  I will defend myself with the fact that the text in this book

  belongs to the genre of literary fiction.

  In my work, in addition to its poetic content,

  there are possible imaginary connections with real roots

  in the past of civilization. My purpose is to suggest

  to contemporary and future generations

  of the human species who the navigators of human happiness

  could be. My intention is not to manipulate

  the facts created in history

  and in related fields which provide facts for history.

  My intention is only to use the facts

  in realizing the dream of human happiness.

  Beings and occurrences in the book

  are only the product of my imagination.

  OTHER BOOKS

  By Rifet Bahtijaragic

  Skice za cikluse (Sketches for Cycles), poetry, Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia, 1972

  Urija (Barren), poetry, Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, 1982

  Krv u ocima (Blood in the Eyes), novel, Wuppertal, Germany, 1996

  Bosanski bumerang (Bosnian Boomerang), novel, Tuzla, Bosnia, 2001

  Oci u hladnom nebu / Eyes to the Cold Sky, poetry, bilingual edition, Tuzla, Bosnia, 2004

  Tragovi (Footprints), poetry and prose, Tuzla, Bosnia, 2008

  TRANSLATOR’S COMMENTS

  An attempt to recreate original forms in a foreign material is always inadequate. Words and ideas can never be perfectly matched and elucidated in translation. The unique melodies and rhythms of the original language are irreparably lost. However, Rifet Bahtijaragic’s Footprints – a collection of poetry and prose deeply rooted in Bosnian soil and completed in Canadian multiculturalism – reaches far beyond the regional or the ethno-specific, making it readily accessible to the Canadian reader despite those shortcomings of translation. Footprints invites readers to look at themselves through the eyes of a foreigner, a foreigner who is equally at home in the realms of the universe and in his native Bosnia. Readers will look at themselves in these pages no matter where they are from, because these pages are about everyone, any human being. Rifet creates simple, graspable explanations for the secrets of the universe as well as for those of the human heart. His cosmic poetry and prose offer the hope that somewhere, beyond the world we have created, there are worlds we can communicate with and thus, maybe, be saved from ourselves.

  —Sanja Garic-Komnenic

  EDITOR’S COMMENTS

  Rifet Bahtijaragic’s Footprints leaves a deep impression on the human heart and mind. There is prose in the form of fictive interviews with a broad spectrum of leaders in our turbulent times – Marshal Tito, Michael Moore, the Dalai Lama, and Stephen Hawking. There is poetry born out of the recent Bosnian War – lyrical, bitter, impassioned, searching, and ultimately hopeful.

  The book consists of three Parts – no titles for them, Parts of a journey. Suggestive, perhaps, of the unspeakable, but in fact emblematic of the unnameable. For this is a book of faith, not in a nameable god, but in the resilience of the human spirit, and its need for assistance from beyond.

  First Part contains an interview with Marshal Tito which makes it perfectly clear that the crumbling of Yugoslavia into its warring constituent pieces need never have happened had there been a leader of Tito’s stature to succeed him. Rifet rejects much of what Tito stood for, but accepts him as the sort of leader whose vision is capable of transcending factional interests and creating a viable, peaceable state. In Second Part, Bahtijaragic speaks with the Dalai Lama, and it’s clear that here is another sort of leader who, if heeded, could lead the world toward peace. In Third Part, conversation with Stephen Hawking reveals the plausibility of looking to contact with extraterrestrials as a resolution to Earth’s conflicts. While I’ve never rejected the possibility that UFO reports sometimes are valid, Rifet Bahtijaragic is the first writer on the subject I’ve encountered of whom I can’t think he’s just spinning a yarn. I might not believe in UFOs yet, but I do believe in Rifet. These interviews are all fictitious, but compellingly believable.

  In my view, the poetry in this book far surpasses the prose as literature. It is some of the finest poetry I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. But its excellence lends passionate and lyrical force to the prose, which makes explicit ideas and opinions we should all heed. It has been an honor to be asked to work with these translations of writing I believe to be, not only excellent, but important in a way that little writing is.

  —George Payerle

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Post Scriptum

  First Part

  Man Is the Measure of All Things

  Poetry

  War

  Tombstone

  If I Were the Wind

  Inheritance

  Enigma

  The Past

  Time

  Human

  Tear

  Naivety

  Green Apples

  Branch

  The Builder of Bridges

  The Storm

  Rainbow

  Mixed Times

  Solitary Man

  Heart in Ice – Crystal

  Drought

  Disobey the Leaders

  Bloody Roses ’92

  Geisha

  Ahmed

  Patriotism

  In Case of Continuity

  Bosnians
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  If Only …

  Do You Hear, Old Man?!

  Sarajevo

  A Marathon Backwards

  Eyes to the Sky

  Patria

  Fear

  Nature’s Cry

  Slumbering Landscape

  Failing to Describe Pain

  Second Part

  Life On Earth Is Merciless If I Look At It Through the

  Window of Kindness

  Poetry

  I Sing in the Rain

  Moments for Love

  Mutation

  Gift

  The Smell of Dust

  Colors On Faces

  Snowflake

  The Poet

  Serenade

  When Our Lips touch

  Rains in the Rose Gardens

  My Thoughts

  Panorama

  Contemporary Poetry

  Seed

  Fate

  I Saw

  Women in My Nights

  Maestro

  Description

  An Ode to Woman

  Beggar

  Life

  Men And God

  The Blind With their Eyes Open

  If He Existed …

  Autumn

  Paths

  Third Part

  Galactic Belonging Is More Important to Me

  Than Tribal Traditions

  Poetry

  The Alternative

  Earth’s Slaves

  Powerlessness of the Powerful

  Mystery

  Insight

  In Somebody’s Arms

  Chaos

  Dream

  Hyacinth

  Spoken As A Stranger

  Beyond the Boundary of insight

  At the Gate of Departure

  Hidden Dimension

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  Rifet Bahtijaragic, a Canadian and Bosnian writer, has for some time been broadening the cultural activities of Bosnians far away from Europe, in Canada. After the publication of his two novels, Blood in the Eyes and Bosnian Boomerang, came a collection of poetry, Eyes in the Cold Sky. Now he has given us Footprints, Poetry and threads of a poetical impression. In form and content it is a unique, innovative book. It comprises poetry and poetical/philosophical essayistic prose, which jointly interweave the personal and the regional, the general and the global, the national and the supra-national, the emotional and the philosophical, the earthly and the cosmic – all stemming from a human need to understand the essential questions of endurance and the survival of civilization.

  The book Footprints induces memories of and comparisons with high achievements of human thought in the books The Principals of a New Science, by Giovanni Battista , The Builders of the World, by Stefan Zweig, and Science and World, by Ljubomir Berberovic. Footprints, with the richness of its themes, motives, and genres, is a unique and unusual spiritual laboratory, reaching for high achievements of human civilization and, in an artistic form, making them instrumental in the struggle for the betterment of humanity. Probably Footprints is thematically and, in terms of genre, most interesting since the poet in his artistic and philosophical lamentations has created fictitious, but factually very possible, interviews with important and inspiring people of our civilization.

  In this book the poet puts himself face to face with Josip Broz, known to the world as Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, and interviews him, asking very coldly analytical and almost merciless questions. The Marshal responds in kind, as was his way. From our perspective now, in 2008, the historical importance of the themes raised in this dramatic dialogue cannot be overstated. Also, those who had a chance to get to know him most authentically over long periods of time will be amazed by the originality and verisimilitude of the interview with Tito more than two and a half decades after the Marshal’s physical death.

  In the poet’s youth, Tito and America were his hopes for the happiness of humanity, its liberation from incessant strife and misery. If in his mature years the hope was no longer Tito’s vision of uniting the world, how can it today be the America of George Bush Jr., an America which has sunk from being the hope of humanity to becoming the generator of its fear? The poet turns to the Dalai Lama. Why? God is always alive as a metaphor, as a vividly expressed notion, as an allegory, as a reflection upon the reality of the material world, and as icon of the primordial human desire for the existence of the irrational in life. If it were possible for God to appear today – concretely, sensually, spiritually, transparently among people, then he would doubtless have the Dalai Lama’s features. This holy man with the common touch, brought to Mount Gabel Musa on Sinai by the poet’s imagination, voices the most noble, interesting, beautiful and healing thoughts to the human beings of today’s civilization.

  In the first part of this book, Rifet Bahtijaragic moves from hope to the weakening of belief in the efficacy of hope, from astonishment and puzzlement at man raising his arm against other men, to the scream and whisper that “God ordered Abraham, or Ibrahim, / To sacrifice a ram instead of a human. / God ordered!” Within the rejection of religious/ethnic conflict to be found throughout Footprints, this pairing of the Hebrew and Arabic names for the same prophet is significant.

  In the second part of Footprints, the poet, through the power of his imagination, makes contact with the Dalai Lama and urges him to tell people how to become good. He recreates the Biblical and Kur’an scene of God telling the prophet the commandments for the creation of goodness in people. Then he starts to doubt whether people ever did follow in the past, do follow now or will yet follow the commandments of God, and he moves to the third part of this book.

  In his imaginary meeting with Stephen Hawking, and in the context of the “Hawaii Declaration on Peaceful Relations with Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” the poet spins threads for the rebirth of our civilization. Man is not only an earthly life form. He is part of the universe and a product of the laws of the universe. Rifet Bahtijaragic has already essayed voyages towards cosmic relations, especially in his novel Bosnian Boomerang. The poet employs an interview with the most prominent of today’s savants in the science of the universe, Stephen Hawking, to seek proof of extraterrestrial civilizations. In the “Hawaii Declaration” he sees new hope that, in contact with much more intellectually advanced forms of life in the universe, people will finally learn that we on Earth are all human beings, and that each man should be responsible for the happiness of global humanity.

  The traces Rifet Bahtijaragic illumines in this book go toward the past of civilization. Along this path “the threads of a poetical impression” find motives that amaze us and help us to see “how the world looks turned upside down” (Ellen Elias-Bursac). However, the traces in this book go toward the future as well. If on that path toward the unknown human beings do not follow the Dalai Lama’s recommendations, there is yet hope that aliens, more intelligent and humane than we on the planet Earth, will give us their hand and save us.

  —Milivoje Jeftic

  POST SCRIPTUM

  The poet’s act of creation begins when his psyche, tired of meandering in everyday life, comes out through the perforated membrane of the mind and creates its own world, to which the reality of everyday life is only a gene that brings forth his inheritance. That process of creation happens under a veil not easily removed; it is difficult to discern its paths, the same as it would be difficult to engage the mind of an onlooker with all those processes happening under the surface of turbulent foaming water in the zone of some of the Icelandic geysers.

  Immanent to poetry is an unusual way of the functioning of the human mind: an unordinary spectrum of its activities. Its ordinary activities are related to physical survival of the human body, movements, coordination, food supply, reproduction … However, the poe
t’s mind abandons the programmed routes of brain functioning. Electrical impulses do not move according to programmed schemes. They are liberated from the biological cords in the net, and they build new connections, grow wings, leave visible lines, and fly above ordinary routs. Poets do not “suffer” from the ordinary, planned, logical, and psychologically explainable … They freely engage in new ways of creating relationships, mix time searching for the most appropriate one, build a specific architecture of space, take over a creative role, and determine the characteristics of their creations. In their job, reproduction is not genetic; it does not start from the genes in which solutions are embedded. For poets, genes are only life initiators whose aspects and relations depend on always-new forms of the functioning of their mind.

  Different paths of thought creation originate from the fact that every human being, although belonging to the human species, has his own personalized mind. Certainly, there are no two painters who, given the same task, would paint the same paintings, nor are there two poets, composers … Poetry is able to express a stance and a philosophical thought in an artistic form, with the images created by sounds evoking smells, with symbols and metaphors; it does it in a personal manner, always different, and is able, unlike exact sciences, to provoke the reader to participate in that creation and to model it according to his own possibilities.

  The creation of all my poems was triggered by an event or by my dealings with the outside real world, or originated inside my imagination, sometimes logical, but often only instinctive and unnatural … In all my poems that contact is enforced and terribly and deeply emotional. It does not mean that my poems would trigger the reader’s mind in the same way, because each reader will discover her/his own personal input in his/her inner or outside world and will build upon it in his/her own way.

  When I asked the Canadian poet George Bowering if he had been surprised by my words about his poetry, he replied that he had never seen himself as a poet who sees things in their perpetual movements, and that is how I see his poetry; I am equally positive that with the Bosnian poet Abdulah Sidran I would forever discuss my understandings of his poetry as an artistic way of expressing historical determinants refined in his mind.