Branko Miljkovic - Tin

 On the other side of the grave beats a living star

And the burnt wind dreams at the beginning of the day

The night in my voice no longer calls

for the lost spaces which belong to the suns. 

My blood asleep under a stone doesn't rave,

because of the hell dug out from the ground alive

Here stones sing and the bird turns to a gray stone

Here everybody is dead for the first time behind the last sun

Oh why are we so alone and weak and brittle

While the Earth turns around its death

somewhere under the ground ripens the silence of evil.

Finally I am dead enough, nothing hurts

Trees lean over oblivion, there's nothing to love

Let flowers bloom from the cursed soil

Behind the poem

Tin 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 or, in this case, lived a sad life.

Augustin "Tin" Ujević was a Croatian poet, translator and journalist. In his youth, he was imprisoned many times as a part of the Croatian Nationalist youth movement. He lived in many cities across Croatia, and also in Belgrade. Until the end of WW2 to 1950, he didn't publish a single work - the country of Yugoslavia forbade him from doing so because he held a post in the nazi Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Tin died in Zagreb in 1955 at the age of 64. 

Tin Ujevic

Branko Miljkovic