Branko Miljkovic - Momcilo Nastasijevic

 Instead of a star, a nightingale from some wall

which from the star differs only by shape and imagination.

The landscape I coaxed, with a cloak

saves its transparency for the ones who can see.

Let the weird, inaudible song above the mountains

move objects in space and stop

when the secret of the marble splashes into the middle of the sea:

what's that, both called and uninvited?

Oh you soft fog singling me out,

here I am, back clean to my original place.

Oh you silence in the holy shadow sculpting my dreams

will you accept that cursed body,

which I'm the first and last to inhabit

a prisoner of the runaway secret and my own blood.

Behind the poem

Momcilo Nastasijevic is one of the seven poems from a cycle in Branko Miljkovic's first poetry book In vain I wake her called Seven dead poets. Each of these seven poems Branko dedicated to Serbian poets whose work he felt was extraordinary and influential.  Those poets also have one more thing in common - they all died a tragic death.

Momcilo Nastasijevic came from a renowned Belgrade family (originally from the city of Gornji Milanovac). Him and his three brothers were artists and their three sisters were scientists. Momcilo, like the rest of his brothers, was a patriot and it reflected in a lot of his works (such as his most famous poem The Trumpet). He worked as a professor in a Belgrade gymnasium and lived a pretty recluse and quiet life, publishing his first works long after other poets and writers his age did. He died of tuberculosis in 1938 at the age of fourty four. 

Momcilo Nastasijevic

Branko Miljkovic