April 23, 1999

What can a poet say at this moment, when I am half trembling, half proud, and bombs are interrupting my words?
One man controls the world, but not himself. He does not know where Serbia is, nor where Serbs are, nor what Kosovo means to them. First he offered to make us happy, but when we refused, he wanted to destroy us. He is bombing us "in order to prevent killing and destruction, and to stop a humanitarian catastrophe. "What a disgrace for humanity and what a humiliation and ordeal for the Serbian people!
They are flying far to find injustice. They are flying around the world, over continents and oceans, and cannot find injustice anywhere except in Serbia and in Kosovo. But for them, this is all happening at the level of a video game. Our lives and our country are only targets on their screens. Sitting in their cockpits, they align little crosses and determine our fate by pressing a button. They are destroying a whole people and all its property.
Who could believe that the nineteen largest and most powerful countries in the world would set out to destroy one of the smallest and most helpless? And now the whole world is facing a test, to which all thinking people, independent spirits, and free media should respond. Should they help the nineteen or the one? Should they impede the one from defending itself or the nineteen from finishing it off? That equation could be used to check the mental health of humanity, which grieves more loudly today for one invisible airplane than for an entire visible people.
The man who controls the world, but not himself, has turned the international community, the United Nations, the European Community, NATO, and the presidents of the largest and most prominent states into a new Monica Lewinsky. He would like to conquer the world without losing a single soldier. And so he is more concerned about three scratched soldiers than about the damaged Kosovo monasteries. But he targeted the monasteries of Gracanica and Sumarica. The only wonder is that he didn't wait for Easter to bomb, as is the custom.
Kosovo is a Serbian archetype. If it were somewhere outside of us, and not within us, we could give it up. As it is, how can we survive if we tear it out of ourselves? That archetype is most alive in Montenegro, and Montenegro forgets that, NATO will remind it.
And what remains for a Serbian poet except to repeat what a Serbian martyr once said, "Child, only do your work!"

Demonstrations against NATO bombing of Serbia:
Saturday, April 24th, 12 noon, in front of the White House at Lafayette Park, Wash. DC
For more info call: St. Luke Orthodox Church (202) 829-4274, www.serbianrelief.org
Sunday, April 25th, 2pm-4pm @ 14th & Independence Ave SW (near the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and the Holocaust Museum), Wash. DC.
For more info call: Alliance for Global Justice (202)-544-9355x15
Saturday, May 1st, 12noon-5pm @ the Ellipse, Wash, DC
For more info call: March on Washington '99, 1-(800)-777-8127, www.march99.com
Saturday, June 5, mass march from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to the steps of the Pentagon, Wash. DC
For more info call: International Action Center (202)- 544-5752, www.iacenter.org