I.
Out of one whole step two
wholes. And each splinters
on into other wholes.
Nothing but circles, spheres,
everything is a closed circuit.
A waterdrop divides into
two drops. And more. And more still.
The drops become a rain.
Dully pounding on the
pane. It’s warm.
It’s only me who is gasping out of
a dream, out of my seeming
separateness. I touch
objects as if they were shards.
Though I know that they are nothing but
new
wholes
that
I
haven’t
gotten
used
to
yet.
Barbara Korun was born in 1963 in Ljubljana, where she received a degree in the Slovene language and comparative literature at the university and where she taught literature to high school students. She also worked at Slovene National Theatre in Ljubljana as a language advisor. Currently, she works as a free-lance writer. Her first poetry collection (The Edge of Grace, 1999) received the National Book Fair Award for a debut collection. For her fourth book (I’ll be right back, 2011) she received the Veronika’s Award (for the best poetry collection of that year) and Golden Bird (for outstanding achievements in literature). Her book of poems Songs of Earth and Lights was published in English translation at Southwords edition in Cork, Ireland 2004.
Barbara Jurša is a Slovenian translator, poet and English teacher living in Ljubljana. She has translated some of the works of several contemporary Slovenian poets, including Jana Putrle Srdić (Anything Could Happen, 2014) and Brane Mozetič (Unfinished Sketches of a Revolution, 2018).
