Milorad Pejić

Istinite priče

True stories

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2023.

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Truth

 

In the olden days when Truth walked the earth

people knew where it came from and who its father

and mother were. Like the princess from One Thousand

and One Nights, it had a new story for every new day

and that was fine because the sun doesn’t rise in the

same place every day either, and a bird sometimes

jumps from branch to branch.

 

That’s how it was till Jana from Smichov said:

”Truth isn’t worth it, there’s not enough killing!”

Since then, truth has been the same for every day.

Truth masters, the thousand plus one of them,

calibrate it and twist likea screw in the brains of

everyone, and that is fine today, this, I mean, having

the sun always rise in the same sky and the birds,

undoubtedly, never fly from one tree to another.

The truth apprentices come by occasionally to

inspect how the screw is holding and, if necessary,

to tighten it a bit.

 

 

The new book of poems by Milorad Pejić titled True Stories is the latest among Samizdat's twenty or so published books so far. It is important to point out that with these “true stories” the poet reasserts his belief that there is not a single regime in the world today that has not, to a greater or lesser extent, become totalitarian and accepted by its “subjects“ as such. In this type of “democratic“ environments even true literature often gets dismissed as a „conspiracy theory“ or, at best, ignored. It is only natural that, in addition to the beauty of the written word, futility, too, has become part of today’s publishing endeavor.

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This is the fifth collection of poems by Pejić, all written in the period between 2015 and 2022. In all of them the poet consistently and with unwavering dedication „deals with the truth“. In these most recent poems nothing is fiction; behind each poem there is a true event, a real person, a specific place, a certain occurrence, or even
a true falsehood that can’t be „forgiven“… But also, something else! Every single poem reveals a true and deep disappointment with the world and this feeling simmers throughout. Upon reading the book, one is inevitably led toward the general realization, which also is the motto of the book: Doomsday is coming soon, let the world go, no loss there!