Recollections of the Uprising

Serbia is a secret world
Where no day knows what the night brews;
And no night sees the dawn’s gray child;
Where each bush in the brake defends its dream
As separate secret flame;
And no bird knows what waves and weaves
Those patterns in the rustling leaves.

The creeping creatures under stones
Are hidden from the lizard’s eye,
And corncob’s ears are deaf to sounds
From a neighboring field of rye.
Things move and change —
And every nook in a leafland glade
Hides something strange.

Who knows what secret is concealed
In a flawless glittering blade of dew?
The cries of toil from a lowland field,
Blown to the hilltop fields and farms,
May be the secret call to arms.

In all the land does anyone know
What secrets may begin to grow
In the untouched breasts of a girl;
What pain like a secret stone
A child holds in its hands;
Or what compulsion bends
The hooked back of a withered crone?

Throughout the land the blowing winds,
Spiced breezes, and rivers and streams,
And bells in steeple and tower
Scatter the secret news abroad,
But who can tell what sudden power
May lurk at the bend in the road
Where the forest begins?

This land has killed the enemy’s trust
In his eyes; small spoor in the mud
May be false or hoof marks in the dust.
Cunning may lurk on every tongue —
In the reaper’s song,
In the stroke of the woodman’s ax,
In the lullaby and the cradle that creaks.