On the theme of Rivers
The Timok* That Was and Isn’t II
(Writings from the River Bank)
I want to write from the river bank, but the writing is dead.
Words of sadness and joy lost meaning along the paths in
the steep tea terrace-like park overlooking Macau harbour,
in the gondola of a cable car lift to Mount Whistler off Van
BC, in the undersea tunnel from the Ålesund airport to the
city, in all of which I left a piece of myself, equally lost to
the present as the last feet-first jump into the Timok waters
off the old sluice, the concrete dregs of which are still clearly
visible poking out of red, dead, sand-like pyrite silt.
I want to fly back to the river bank in my memory, but
the memory is all but faded. Once known tastes are jaded,
environment irreparably degraded, privileges annulled,
rights downgraded (in the aftermath of a crisis of capitalism
that devours its own tale) and the Timok is a dead canal,
redder than the Mekong on whose banks buffalos graze.
No grass grows around the Timok’s barren banks, no birds
fly over it, as no bugs hatch in its poisoned liquid that today
might perhaps still be called “water” only metaphorically.
I’ll go to the bank of what used to be the river and I’ll mourn
the fate of the planet whose dying I did nothing to prevent,
and my unfulfilled dreams. And the Timok of yesteryear, of
course. I am not sure I want to, but I think that, after many
years, I will cry once again. Bitterly. I do want to write from
the river bank, but the river is dead. And therefore all attempts
at poetry are a priori doomed to a prosaic mental exercise.
So I won’t write from the river bank, for the river is gone, it
has died, there, at the end — and the beginning — the cradle
and the deathbed of the world.
* Not a particularly mighty river, the Serbian Timok, a variant of Classical Roman Timacus, gave name to the Thracian tribe of Timachoi in antiquity and to the Slavonic tribe of Timocani in the early Middle Ages. Since 1920s it has been turned into a sewer of one of the biggest copper processing plants in Europe, a situation that exacerbated especially after mid-1970s. It rolls so much poisonous sludge into the Danube right on the spot where the borders of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania meet that both Romania and Bulgaria have brought a complaint against Serbia to international monitoring bodies because of it. I was born in an old bishopric see that is a small town now, 7 km from the river.
Author Biography
Miodrag Kojadinović is a polyglot and writes in English, Serbian, Dutch, and French and speaks two dozen other European and Asian languages. His work has been featured in anthologies in the US, Serbia, Canada, Russia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, India, Montenegro, the UK, and Croatia.