Motherland, I love you.

Dreamers search for you a lit torch that leads them to your towns, wealthy streets, and yards full of flowers. They call you with their song.

I try to put my dreams aside, and send them to the universe just like an orphan, but the wheel of history creeks.

Oh, my patient, sad, motherland? The gift you give us in never perfect. The toy you made for your children is fragile. You can't feed all of our hungry hopes but is that a reason to leave you?

Your smile covered with pain, is joy to my eyes. Your breast gave us life. That's why your eyes are always open. For centuries you have built, but still your free, blue sky isn't made.

I give all of my love to you. Oh, motherland, I saw your mild, gentle face, and then loved your sad destiny.

The poets nit a thread of golden fantasy for you, painters gave new immortality to your face, the sea gave it's pearls to rap you, to cover you, to make you even more precious. I sit alone. I wonder where hidden boundaries of knowledge lie. Somewhere between man and animal, who's heart can't speak.

No! A man couldn't do that! Is man to blame for destroying a country? Is he to blame for the death of dawn, for the eclipse of the sun?

They killed your youth, devastated your cities, bridges and mosques. You are now left without a heart, but not without your soul.

Only your name stands as the symbol of your existence. Pride and spite are still there. You and I shall make a temple of your suffering, motherland. We'll make it in the memory, and the hatred of our enemies, who will envy the glitter of our luck.

Goodness will proudly stand next to us. We'll take the humble way, where we shall meet hope. You are the land of pride, anger, selfishness, cruelness, and at the same time, enduring, strong, merciful, full of beautiful colors, where all the people live full of happy dreams.

What else to say to you, motherland, but these beautiful Kulenovic's rimes:

"This is my inch of land
This is where my mother gave
Birth to me,
And the first primrose glittered
From sheter
And the first skylark
Appeared in the sky,
This is where I found out about
The world,
And fell in love with it, and

It's blossom and twitter... ."

 NAJLA POTUROVIĆ  24/10/1999