Iztok Osojnik was born in 1951 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. A graduate in comparative literature, he was one of the founders of the prankish sous-realisme movement. His published works include poetry collections viz, as Darkness a/July (2002), Once upon a time there was America (2003), From the New World (2003) and Mister Today (2004), novels such as The Story a/Mr. Pirjevec and Me, which is autobiographical and The Dark Matter (2005), and a book of essays The Smile a/Mona Lisa (2004). A selection of his poems in Czech was published (0 Tobe O4ju, Drewo a srd, Zlin). He has won many awards such as Jenko (1997, the best book of poetry award), Veronika (1998, the poetry book of the year), Zupanèiè (1992, the town ofLjubljana), Italian Eriuli PoetryAward (2002), and Hanibal Luciae Laureate 2004 award. He is widely translated. He is also an artist, tour director, and mountaineer.

Truth

Mister Today pondered:
truth is irrelevant, what matters is what people think.

For example: father, dying opposite the room
in which there is a wheezing man
who has by and large cooked up the Balkan butchery.
(Stane Dolanc, an apparition reduced
to gargling and a coma.)
I was at my father’s side when he was lying
at the neurological clinic (unworthy of that name).
I was with him the moment he came out of a month’s
coma and looked at me with eyes frill of vacant amazement.
I was there also when he was forcibly transferred
from the clinic to a hospital in Menge~.
And also when we finally succeeded in getting him
into the elderly people’s home in Kolezija, where, twice
today already, he has gone to the other side among the
unattainable shadows. But a few times,
when he was awake, I wasn’t there.
Father is now taking leave for ever, thinking
his eldest son has forgotten him.
An irretrievable and irreparable thought, finality as such,
no history can amend.

And the other way round?
If truth matters and not what people think?
Where does that take us?
There beyond the human world,
where the primeval reality of the world rests?

Mister Today pondered, but received no answer.
An answer may come by itself.


Son Meeting His Father

Mister Today watches his son in the cradle.
Out of the river of time, he is looking at a moment
of life, a dot of the universe
sleeping, its shut eyes fluttering.
Along the loop of the universe runs a river of gentleness.

Black water has eaten away his legs and lungs,
his consciousness has sunk into his gullet.
His little one is grinning happily in his dreams and
between the two worlds incomprehensible chasms gape,
the river of gentlencss runs through them
in the form of a little animal’s breathing.

He is embraced by black milk,
the words have tired,
like ravens they fly across a plowed field
with rings of mist and October on their wings,
the little one, asleep in his cradle,
resting at the bottom of the universe,
in his dreams, watching his father, whose father is dying,
that is his granddad,
it’s all terribly confusing,
and Mister Today closes the book silently,
and his son is asleep
and the river runs neither forwards nor backwards
and it licks his animal feet
and his little one is asleep.
 

With thanks from " Third Word" edited by Lana Derkac and Thancham Poyil Rajeevan