Serbia

She blooms in the midst of her death. Barren green fields. Grey communist sky.
Burned soil and derelict buildings given up for loss.
This world is crumbling.
Few people walk the streets, and those who do rarely lift their eyes. They have passed from anger to despair. Cyrillic hope betrayed its promise years ago.
And yet she stands, defiantly clinging to life – the beautiful part.
Her branches bare – or ripped from her. The left side of her body is aching with decay.
Look deeper. Three shoots lift their heads with delicate buds, pink as cherry blossoms.
I will not go down quietly into the night, she says.

In the last five hours we have had our passports stamped through three countries.

Fledging Kosova, clinging to her right to her own name. Young. Hopefully watching for her own future by clutching a declaration from the past. Illyria asking for her homeland.

I wonder if Phillip would recognize the faces of his Macedonia. The land speaks of Greek shepherds, but the signposts are all written with the large hand of the former USSR.

Serbia placed the Slav in Yugoslavia. Power struggles at the border just because “they could”. Great stakes were lost at the fall of the iron curtain. Scarved babushkas wander through the station waiting for children who have vanished to the cities, or perhaps never came back from the war. White blossoms scattered across the hillside speak of hope…. But is this war really over?

Later…
Serbia hurts me. There are faces here I do not recognize. We sit in the train station watching people… they live in a land, it seems, where it is always winter and never Christmas. The cold November rain streams through a hole in the skylight, adding damp to the haze and smoke. There is a mile of personal space around each individual. No one gets in. Nothing comes out.

There are no children here.

The team has gone to dinner and to see a bit of the capital. We are staying with the luggage. People walk by staring…. Perhaps at our very foreign faces… perhaps wondering how three people could carry all this baggage. These eyes are dark and sinister. Amazing the lengths to which corruption can mangle a human heart.
Who will come and bring hope to this place? Who will stay here and give life to this cave of decay?