Sun

He was born at Ionian Sea, at seacoasts full of sun, dark gardens, and pale statues, and like a sea gull, he bathed in azure, light and fragrance of permanent warmed waters. His mother often carried him through cool shades of some trees which leaves smelled of dream.

Unlucky poet! When he was a child he went to a country where the sky is pale and icy, the sun is white and cold, and through those seacoasts winds cry. And one thought, like a wound, warned him eternally to his sunny seacoast, dark gardens and calm statues. Together with waves and winds, he wept bitterly and brokenhearted on the strand of melancholic unfamiliar sea.

But, when his hair, blond like faded leaves, became white; when his passionate and nice eyes, that once had a colour of branches of winter lemon or shallow sea, became unclear; when in his veins he felt the winter without its spring, Destiny brought him back again to Ionia.

There everything was like it was before. But He wasn't the same anymore: and sunny seacoasts of joyful and passionate Ionian Sea he couldn't recognize! Painful, he closed his eyes tightly, and looked inside himself. And, look! there he saw that former sun, that amazing and enormous sun that once made everything around him alive - leaves that had the smell of dream, and that he could see the white and cool blood of statues flowing through calm stone, and made him live and suffer the deep and huge passion of men.

It was the Sun of Youth that passed, the sun that shined still only deep in evening's twilight of one's soul and that gave, to everything that it illuminated, the strange and magic beauty of Illusion.

Because, things have the appearance that our soul gives them.

Jovan Dučić

Poetry in Prose - "Blue Legends"