Last Breath
Waiting.
Yet no one is there to come back,
Through fearful night, endless, black.
Falling stars,
Accompanied with signs of death,
And millions of wishes merge into one.
Everything’s flashing, everything’s loud,
Someone takes in their last breath.
Still waiting.
While sorrow eats up a beating heart,
A trembling child hopes and dreams,
Trying not to fall apart,
Wanting to breathe, wanting to be.
Waiting.
Looking around, dawn is gray.
With no one to listen, what else awaits,
Wide spread cemetery,
Silence. No flowers, no gates.
Gone
A soul trembles leaving a child,
A dead woman, a dead man.
Smell of dust and despair,
A burnt land, bodies piled.
There is no sun, there is no moon,
Only missiles across the skies.
It’s all red, it’s so loud,
Smoke stifles fading cries.
Feet in ashes, shattered hopes,
Standing, gazing – all alone.
Does a rock in children’s hands
Scare your mighty, filthy gun?
While your littles smile and play
Mourning mothers now have none.
Cold Pictures
My skin’s cold,
My heart stripped naked
And for a while,
I’ve been falling
Deeper down.
Clouds are hovering
Over my street,
My head,
My hands.
Somehow, I guess,
The sky’s breaking apart,
And sunsets barely
Take my breath away.
I haven’t been breathing
For a long time anyways,
At least,
Not how I should’ve been.
Stars still shine,
They twinkle again,
They fall again,
Yet, I tiredly close my eyes.
Every glow is just
A dim light
And vivid pictures
Are hardly glimpsed.
I don’t cry anymore
And I barely remember smiling.
SLAĐANA LAZIĆ
SLAĐANA LAZIĆ: In 2021, Slađana Lazić published her first poetry book named ‘Svetionik na dlanu’ with the support of SPKD ‘Prosvjeta’ and the city of Tuzla. She is a member of the Literary Club ‘Meša Selimović’ in the SPKD ‘Prosvjeta’ in Tuzla. In addition to writing, she is engaged in drawing, painting and graphic design. In the Library of the City of Belgrade, on November 14, 2023, the promotion of the book ‘Srma za Aco Šopov’ was held, published by the Association ‘Makedonium’ from Belgrade. The book is a collection of poems and essays in the Macedonian and Serbian language, inspired by the character and work of the Macedonian poet and one of the founders of contemporary Macedonian poetry, Aco Šopov. Slađana Lazić is represented in the collection, and her poems have been translated to Macedonian. In 2023, Slađana was awarded for poetry in Trieste, Italy, ‘Concorso Internazionale di Poesia e Teatro Castello di Duino – XIX Edizione’, in the category ‘Poesie del cuore’. In 2020, Slađana Lazić won the third prize at the Concorso Internazionale di Poesia e Teatro Castello di Duino XVI Edizione, the largest competition of young poets in the world, which is organized under the auspices of the President of Italy and the Italian National Commission for UNESCO, and organized by the Association ‘Poetry and solidarity’ (‘Poesia e Solidarietà’). Poems of the young poetess were included and printed in English in the anthology of poems in Brussels 2018 (The Aquillrelle Wall of Poetry, book seven), in which authors from all over the world are represented. In 2017, the promotion of the anthology ‘Poslednji cvetovi zla’ was held in Đura Jakšić’s House in Belgrade in honor of the jubilee – 150 years since the death of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, in which she was also represented as one of the authors. She was awarded at several festivals, her works were published in anthologies in Belgium, Italy, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia.
Beyond The River Beyond The Sea 