Perhaps now your spirit
flutters like a baby bee
or breathes with the rhythm of cicadas.
If your body does not fear now
the affront
of a justice
that no longer concerns you
and that only in a cold nose still appears
from under the sheet,
you will forgive those
who did not understand
you were leaving us.
And if in death you opened doors
closed to you while in life,
may the doors you closed or opened
while in life
be light ones, and may no destiny
you did not look for
and did not desire
disturb your sleep.
Requiesce in peace
as you asked
after the last landing
of your life.
May what you did not forget
be rendered to you
and may the eternal moment
have the colour
of the sea’s repose:
serene.
Mauro A. Bogdanovic was born in Fiume of a Montenegrin father and an Italo-Croatian mother. Genoese by adoption, he is a writer, translator and publisher’s consultant. He has written two novels, two collections of poetry and numerous short stories as well as critical works. He has translated more than ten works of literature, history, philosophy and economics from several different languages. He has worked in Rome as a mathematician and physicist on the EEC artificial intelligence project Esprit and for IBM in Milan, Genoa and Brussels. He was voluntary professor of the History of Scientific Thought at the University of Genoa and has worked with the department of the Histoire des Mentalités at the Sorbonne in Paris. His novel La Vacanza – a pitiless, ironic study of the discomforts of adolescence – was published last June by Il Filo, Rome.