Vasko Popa – Vlach Poet
Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others –Octavio Paz
BLIND SUN
Two blighted legs
Holding a blind sun
The morning rays – gone to work
On the other side of the sky
Rather than its threshold
The noon is beyond the Pale
Cavorting with thunders
She’s never at home.
The evening takes to the Road
The bedsted on her back,
She’s begging on some constellation.
Only the night appears,
With outstretched arms,
To welcome a blind sun.
Vasko Popa, the Serbian Vlach poet, was born in the 1922 and came of age at a time when the world was embroiled in World War II. He fought in World War II as a Partisan, and was captured and imprisoned in the Bečerek concentration camp. He was the first Yugoslav poet to break with the Socialist Realism style of writing, and focused heavily on Serbian folklore traditions.
