Above the roar of a high waterfall a magic town grows,
dark and tightly knit, above the water’s blaze;
the cascading whiteness widely its freshness throws,
the eternal youth of the waters that human eyes amaze.

These are the forces of the Earth that endlessly boil.
One river magically into the other falls.
The black branches frame that white turmoil
Whose snow-white solitude human soul enthralls.

All the expanses of beauty and virginal fragrant lakes
I can feel in the foam of that roaring domain,
all sunsets over the forests and all the daybreaks
of the mystical Bosnian land, where waters and shadows reign.

Near the travertine caves, where the dripping plants grow,
under the roaring pearly foam, everything seems to float.
Some magic rocky forms the Earth does here show
and the trees which to restful dreams an eternity devote.

From that watery fan arrives an endless breath of life
and it is marvelous that human voices it simply buries
in awe and in rapture, as if overwhelmed with all that strife,
while the incessant roar from mountains their spirit carries.

Tiny we are here and with a deep connected well
of our unknown being, like the spray drizzling all around,
without a goal, in the beauty whose whirlpools our spirits swell,
without a trace, like a rainbow whose colors in the sky abound.

Translated by Ivo Soljan – © 2009 Ivo Soljan

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