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Pero Zubac: The new Old Bridge
... The Old bridge is gone. It exists on bright oil paintings in which painters poured Mostar sun; it exists on watercolour paintings and graphics, on crocks that tourists used to buy at Potkujundžiluk, on millions of photographs on which smiling globe-trotters witness that then were in Mostar; in poems and stories, in essays and novels, in soul of people who love Mostar.
I, one of many who built a word or two of theirs into the myth of Mostar; I, an honorary citizen of the Town that’s no more; I, a poet of “Mostar rains” which can not be destroyed, because the haven tells yes or no, not people; I could say a bitter and painful word above the Old bridge, to make my soul light for a moment. But I won’t.
There is an Old bridge, and there will be a New Old bridge, I know it, but that Mostar will never be the same. People make a town.
And people are scattered around the “white world”...
I used to go to Mostar with Miroslav Antic most often. And with no sorrow, with pride, for we remembered a Town that is no longer; I finish this nugget of memory with his lyrics he wrote in the garden of Mostar Hotel on June 30 , 1973, before my very eyes, at that miraculous time, never to come again:
“Every soul must meet the inner,
Neretva under the Old Bridge
Thus our joys and sorrows
Are always different and same.”
(1993)
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