Poems of Nataša Radanović (Serbia – Sweden)

THE WOMAN WHO CARRIED HER CITIES
Nataša Radanović (Serbia – Sweden)

I did not leave the cities.
The cities left me.

They left behind streets
that no longer exist anywhere,
windows in which, once,
my face used to live,
and doors through which I walked
believing that a person
can always return
to the place where the heart was left behind.

I did not know then
that we do not return to places.
We return to the self
we left there.

I carried my cities
the way a woman carries scars:
she does not show them to everyone,
but she knows where they begin
when silence falls.

In one, I learned
that love is not always a home.
In another,
that leaving is not the end.
In a third,
that a person can be surrounded by people
and still be speaking
to the silence within.

And there were roads
that led nowhere
except deeper into me.

So today
I do not count the miles.

I count what
has survived within me
after every departure.

For a person is not the place
where she was born,
nor the place
where she remained.

A person is what she carries
when there is nothing left
to carry.

I carried my cities.

I carried their rain,
the scent of old walls,
voices I can no longer hear,
a window turned toward the sky,
and people I could not save
from time.

I carried myself, too —
that little girl
who still believes
that what is lost
can be found
if you walk toward the light
long enough.

Today I know:

no city possesses us.

We leave behind
what we once were,
and take from each place
what we are yet to become.

So when they ask me
where I am from,

I do not know
how to give them
a single name.

I am from all the places
that broke me
and all the places
that put me together again.

From one childhood.
From one sea.
From countless thresholds.
From foreign languages
and my own silence.

From the love that came.
From the love that left.
From the hands that held me
and the hands that let me go.

And from every road
on which I believed
there was nowhere left to go.

And yet —

here I am.

I no longer carry cities
upon my shoulders.

I carry them
within me.

And wherever I stand,
if one day they ask me
where my home is,

I will show them
my heart.

Because after all the departures,
a person finally understands:

home is not a place
to which we return.

Home is that within us
that no departure
has ever managed to take away.




BEHIND THE MIRROR, OUR GREATEST SECRET
Nataša Radanović


He travelled.

Through cities that did not know his name,
through mountains whose peaks
touched the clouds,
along rivers carrying
other people’s stories toward the sea.

He changed streets,
hotels,
stations,
the sky above him.

But wherever he arrived,
she appeared before him.

Not as a woman
waiting at some window,
not as a memory
slowly erased by time,

but as a face
suddenly returning to him
from the depth of the mirror.

He would stop.

And look.

Because sometimes a person
does not recognize the one they love
by the face.

They recognize them
by the silence they awaken within.

She lived far away,
across another sea,
in another city,
beneath another sky.

And yet,
whenever he wrote to her,
he felt that he was not sending words
across the distance,

but opening a door
that had always existed
between them.

The letters travelled.

Some arrived slowly,
the way the most important truths
often arrive.

Some carried within them
the scent of rain,
a distant city,
a night
too long
for two people
who could not touch.

And she read them
as though something were returning to her
that had never ceased
to belong to her.

It was not his closeness
that made them true.

It was the fact
that they had survived
his distance.

For a love that depends
upon the nearness of bodies
is sometimes only
a habit of the heart.

But a love that survives
distance,
silence,
time,
and the fear of loss —

already knows
something about eternity.

So wherever he travelled,
he carried within himself
an invisible place.

A place where she
was always there.

Sometimes he would look
at his reflection in the mirror
and it seemed to him
that behind his face
stood hers.

Not because the mirror
could reveal her,

but because love
sometimes sees
what reality
does not know how to show.

And then he understood:

the greatest distances
are not the ones
measured by maps.

The greatest distance
is the one between two people
who have ceased




WHEN THE WORLD FORGETS A HUMAN BEING
Nataša Radanović

One day
the world will forget
our footsteps.

The streets will change their names,
houses will have new windows,
trees will grow
where once
we waited for one another.

Someone else will walk
the same road
and never know
that someone once
loved there.

That is how time works.

It does not ask
what was sacred to us.

It simply passes.

And so I have learned
not to seek eternity
in stone.

Stone remembers shape,
but it does not remember the heart.

Eternity is somewhere else.

In the hand
that once stopped
another human being from falling.

In the word
we spoke
when someone
needed it.

In the bread
we shared
even when
we had only one piece.

In the child
we taught
not to hate
simply because
someone had taught them otherwise.

In the person
to whom we said:

“Do not be afraid.
You are not alone.”

Perhaps the world
will forget our name.

But if someone,
because of us,
once believed in goodness,

then we did not live in vain.

For a human being is not
what they possessed.

Nor what they conquered.

Nor the number of doors
that opened for them.

A human being is
what they leave behind
in the souls
they have touched.

That is why I am not afraid
that one day
my name will fade
from paper.

What frightens me more
is the possibility
that someone might pass me by
and I failed
to help them believe
in humanity again.

For centuries
we have built walls.

Between nations.
Between faiths.
Between languages.
Between “us”
and “them.”

And then we discovered
that walls do not know
how to stop death.

They only know
how to stop a human being.

And what, then,
is left to us?

To learn again
the hardest thing:

that another person’s pain
does not become someone else’s
simply because
it does not hurt our own body.

That a child crying
on the other side of the world
is no less a child
than the one sleeping
beneath our own roof.

That a mother waiting
for news of her son
belongs to no flag.

She belongs
to humanity.

And perhaps that is
the only homeland
we must never lose.

Humanity.

Not as a word
we speak
at ceremonies,

but as a hand
we extend
when it would be