MY DEAR HOMELAND

For some time now, I have been congratulating you on the holidays with sadness, actually – overwhelmed with grief due to the illness you have been suffering from for a quarter of a century and due to the pain inflicted upon you by some of your sons with shameless disrespect towards you, who fail to understand that you, as their Mother, are the most important part of their messed-up beings. It is sad, immeasurably sad to watch these arrogant individuals whom you gave birth to, whose souls you nurtured with your fragrant fields, azure skies, and evening purple horizons; it is too sad to watch their perversion with which they inflict pain upon you instead of loving and respecting you, because they learned about the World and all the most important things about the World in your lap. I grieve, my good Homeland, for the perversion of these sons of yours who are such degenerates that they are even plotting against you.

But, your birthdays have been happening for a thousand years – in spite of all of them. You endure (only temporarily ill) thanks to the love of those among us – both living and vanished in history – who love you as a motherland can be loved, who are insatiable for your exciting spring blooms, evening purples, and dawns awakened by birdsong...

Many are leaving you, going to other, grey climates, and they inform us that they feel safe there, but not happy. They cannot be happy because a person without a homeland is barely half a person. As the most beautiful part of us, it is here, within us, amidst the multitude of ineffable beauties and unique colors of the imaginative Una, or the boiling white waterfalls of Martin Brod; the pollen of your withered meadows, those that your wicked sons have disfigured with mass graves and whose minds are obsessed with dark abysses, softly and fragrantly reaches our souls.

We will not abandon you precisely because you are currently ill and because you are exposed to the assaults of some of your perverted sons, and we know that you have successfully overcome many illnesses before. We are with you because now is the time, my dear and long-lived one, to constantly address you as the great poet and patriot of Nietszchean mind and heart, Khalil Gibran, whose thought was adopted by the renowned John F. Kennedy, used to say.

Therefore, we will not ask you – ungrateful and selfish – what you, Homeland, can do for us, but it is a historical moment in which each of us must ask:

WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU TODAY, MY GOOD, LONG-LIVED HOMELAND?

Esad Duraković