Guest Blogger: Maja Klarić––A Traveling Poet.

Every other Sunday is our day for Guest Author Postings by mystery writers who base their stories in non-US settings.  This week we have a special and unusual treat, a writer who lives a life of mystery—rather than writes them—Croatian poet Maja Klarić.  I (Jeff) met Maja at a literary festival on the Greek island of Tinos and her work blew me away. Maja graduated with degrees in English language, literature, and comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and spends much of her life (still under 30) traveling and hiking the earth, creating poetry along the way.  She’s won several international awards, including Castello di Duino, Sea of Words, Apilski susreti and Ulaznica.  These (all copyrighted) poems are from her second collection, “Quinta Pitanga” written in Bahia, Brazil during her two-month residency there on a UNESCO/Aschberg scholarship for international artists.

Welcome Maja.

Getting There Slowly

Approaching

Carefully

Like a mouse

Slinking towards a seductive smell

Silently

As a sunrise

Invisibly

Resembling a hunter

Disguised in colours of the landscape

With a rifle aiming

At the perfect place

A fatal shot of no return

Sneaking

On the tip of your toes

Trying to make as little noise as possible

Avoiding

Dried out leaves and heaps of broken branches

Anything that might reveal

You coming closer

Close enough to reach it

Far enough to remain unseen

Until the time is right

To get hold of her

To capture her

Still breathing

Abundant

And self-sufficient

The perfect poem.

The Process of Writing

Tempting part is

The overflow of ideas in the most inappropriate place

Words which could easily turn into sentences

An oceanic landscape, a colorful setting, an odd passer by

Things out of the ordinary, strange noises

A yearly ritual secretly performed on a warm summer night

The first bite of local food

An attempt to speak the language early morning at the market

Buying shrimps or something equally unpronounceable

Curious legends of a place, tinged with magic

Even local newspapers' back page

Well equipped with photos of curious events

The possibility of an encounter

Of a friendship, of love

Phone calls from home

Voices of your parents, affectionate and concerned

A poorly lit street on your way back

The kind you promised to avoid

A pleasant stroll

An unexpected rain shower

A curious conversation

The easy part.

Discovery

Words were hidden like golden coins in a children's game

Buried in the sand, flattened by the waves

Only to be discovered

After an exhausting quest and a test of patience

But they were found

Like rare sand dollars on the beach

And valued just as much.

The Crossing

Midday spread over All Saints' Bay

Like an icing over a cake

And the sunlight sparkled like golden leaves

On statues in Saint Francis' church

I am trying hard to feel

The difference between the ocean and the sea

The sight of Salvador' skyscrapers

On the very peak of the peninsula

And Ilha do Frade we're leaving behind

Are equally mesmerizing

We take the best positions

Right on the nose of catamaran

And in between captain's eyes

To be able to see more clearly

What's ahead

What's ahead is approaching fast

At the velocity my thoughts cannot follow

Metaphors are sinking like a shipwreck

Scratching the slippery sides of the boat

A school of dolphins that somebody just ordered

Is jumping in and out and over the waves

To make the whole scene infallible.

Shores of pleasure

In the morning

The ocean is as flat as the surface of a bowl full of oil

Receding inconspicuously further and further away

Tempting us to follow it

Like an enticing song of a mermaid

The ocean is a common room

Where older ladies sit and dip their feet and idly chat

And men are in up to their waist

Fishing for lunch

If the sky changes colour

The ocean follows

As if in an attempt to match all the nuances of blue

An odd current in the shallow waters

Is meandering its way through the sand

Leaving long serpentines

Before vanishing in the deep

And we

In a dreamlike contention of first weeks on the island

Still incapable of believing

That nature has been so generous

To these shores of pleasure

To us.

Drawings in the Margins

She left a handful of sketches

For she didn't know how to describe

The beauty of a sunset behind the mango trees

Without sounding pathetic or overly sentimental

Or how to fit into a single line

Never ending traces that animals left on the beach

She felt incapable of capturing

All the segments a dawn is comprised of

No matter how simple it may seem

And although a picture should speak a thousand words

Hers only spoke of a few

Mumbling on the margins

Thoughts of Discomfort

At the bottom of each pleasure

Lies an uneasiness

The question of

How much we will owe

For what we have received

Or will we be punished for the envy

And a mounting frustration

Over nature being more productive than ourselves.

A feeling biting into every thought

And a skillfully hidden fear

If we came here for a lack of imagination

Or is it just now that we're discovering it.

Scenes of Summer

The sea at high tide

Approaches slowly

Like a lover testing

The boundaries of politeness

Re-shaping the curves of the sand

And claiming his territory

Thus has been our travel.

In the evening we'd go swimming

Or jumping from the dock

While the sun is leaking into the sea

Like a freshly cut wound

And crabs are hysterically searching

For something that they've lost

Just consider

How far we are from home

Think of the trip

If an emergency should occur

And how long would it take

To forget this.

Excursions

Like a picnic on a traffic circle

You improvise little excursions out of the ordinary

Just so you could feel

That the reality

Can still be displaced

And your life

Might take a different turn

Some day.

Guest Blogger Maja Klarić—Sunday