|
Bitter the Single Fruit Kebabs tasted more pungent in such pure air as swept down from our restaurant terrace in Aracinovo to the city disported at its feet, unmissable for the lightest piece of artillery. War writhed far from that horizon. We mused on friends in Sofia, on psycholinguistics, whether Macedonian was a tongue in its own right. The sharp wine left no bitter after-taste. Since then, terms of trade have tamed hostile neighbouring governments. The enemy, instead, has been sought and found within, the deeper enemy within us all ignored. Constructing a nation proved a task too tiresome, the pursuit of prosperity in partnership too pedestrian; simpler, swifter, to offer the youngsters' bodies to uniforms, mature minds to facile fascists, a country to the scrapheap. Though they exhort adults to martyrdom in places of worship, nowhere do they teach their kids the craft of orphanhood. While paranoia re-casts old friends as interfering foes, self-righteousness twists wrongness into might. Refugees and gun-runners cross in the night; homes become bunkers, targets, graves of rubble. As paramilitaries line up to cleanse shopkeepers, the President bravely echoes an infant's cry of "No!" © Bryan Murphy |
|
Commentary: This is a deeply political poem. It also reflects enhanced confidence in my own work, to the point that I sometimes feel free to discard the orthodox dictum of "show, don't tell". After all, a poet doesn't have to compete with photographers. The title is a variation on that of a novel by Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit), although my plea is for multi-ethnicity and multi-culturalism. In 1997 I was living in pleasant semi-retirement in Bulgaria and went on a weekend visa run to Macedonia, next door. I had a contact there, a philosopher, who took me up to dine in the hills outside Skopje (it may or may not actually have been Aracinovo). Looking down on the city, it was impossible not to think of what an easy target Skopje would be from the hills around it if events in nearby Bosnia and Kosovo were reproduced in Macedonia. Macedonia was making progress: it was noticeably livelier and less poor than Bulgaria, and was sorting out its historical problems with its neighbours: Serbia, Greece and Albania as well as Bulgaria. But then the human heart baulked at the difficulty of sustaining such steady but slow progress. The country began to implode and the two major ethnic groups went at each other's throats. "Cleanse" in the penultimate line obviously means "murder". In all wars it seems to be kids, women and the infirm - the most vulnerable - who suffer most. And even close to home in Ulster, we can see that the power of the paramilitaries is the biggest block to peace. But the poem is not without hope. Occasionally, a single person can make a positive difference, as Macedonia's President, Boris Trajkovski did in 2001, risking his political future and his physical life to conjure for his country, at least for the moment, a fragile peace. Bryan Murphy Bonfire contributor |