ii. Night holds history inside its black cape.
You know when your unit reaches the top of this ridge
your truck will turn, unload, and the firing begins.
Sarajevo sits sparkling, a diamond sunk below the ring of hills;
cosmopolitan, blended Ottoman and Austrian and Bosnian,
a jangle of colour and bright spirit, a tight woven history.
You enjoy the lights now; ‘like fairyland’, your mother used to say;
and she’d wonder: ‘what are you doing here?’
People below don’t know what you know.
That they are now targets, ducks in a shooting gallery.
That fifteen hundred children will be killed, ten thousand adults;
three hundred mortars a day will burn their books, crush their history,
buildings and bodies fragmented.
For four years – no heat, no power, no water, no food.
Then they will know blackness:
a lightless city where only your flares will ignite it
so mortars can find victims in the dark.
That long black road may go on forever.