Charles Simic

The teacher sits with eyes closed.

When you play chess alone, it’s always      your move.

I’m in the last row with a firefly      in the palm of my hand.

The girl with red braids, who saw the girl      with red braids?

...

Oh those awful Serbs! Until recently no one cared or knew much about them in the West and now almost everyone has an opinion about them and it’s most likely to be unfavourable. Karadzic and Mladic – icons of inhumanity – are taken as embodiments of the soul of their people. Even before the wars in the former Yugoslavia started, American newspapers are offering analyses of the Serbs. A New York Times editorial on 4 April 1989, for instance, described Yugoslavia’s Roman Catholic republics as ‘the country’s most advanced and politically enlightened region’ now undeservedly threatened with ‘bullying’ by a block of Orthodox Christian republics. It was an open-and-shut case: a struggle between industrious Roman Catholic Slavs, whose culture and traditions are a part of civilised Europe, and the Byzantine East, where laziness and violence are the rule. Later on, during the war in Bosnia, it was the Bosnian Muslims who were praised for their affinities with the West and for being unlike Muslims elsewhere.

Regiments of the damned, halt!

So, we turned to take a better look At the spread eagle on the sidewalk.

There he was, hair combed over his eyes.

Abominations, he called after us,

Everything crummy and screwed up since Adam Is thanks to you!

Let’s see you turn water into wine!

Let’s see you get down on your knees and pray!

     *

You are...

They had already attached the evening’s tears to the windowpanes. The general was busy with the ant farm in his head. The holy saints in their tombs were burning. One of them, flames and all, was the prisoner of several female movie stars. Moses wore a false beard and so did Lincoln. X reproduced the Socratic method of interrogation by demonstrating the...