There's another poem there from Yugoslavia.
I'll come to that directly.
I got a pretty rough one here about Ohio,
but I think I'm going to keep that out just
to be on the safe side.
May I read the other love poem from Yugoslavia.
This is called, "I Wish I May Never Hear
Of The United States Again."
That's not true because I regard myself as a patriotic person.
That is to say, I love my native place and my native language
and my friends.
We were talking about that this afternoon, some of our friends
together.
The matter of learning somebody else's language
is also a matter of maybe learning something
about love that people all over have for their native places.
Now, surely this is patriotism.
We were very good at this in America at one time.
We've got awfully muddled at it now,
but I hope that we recover it, because it's not merely
a matter of nationalism, or attacking someone else.
It's a matter of affection--
and I don't think there's any life without affection.
The title of this poem, of course,
is from the old one about Nolan, the man put on the boat
and left aside because he had said, I wish--
damn the United States, I wish I may never hear of the United
States again.
"The ringing and sagging of blue flowers, and the spider,
shedding her diamond shadow down on the turtle's body.
The old woman's hair, locked golden,
spinning a web out of her clothes,
and the girls who have no trouble worrying
about the length of their dresses, as they stroll slowly,
vanishing into their own twilight
beside the slim shoulders of the donkeys.
I can't be silent among these.
One afternoon in Northern California,
which is a Jack London nuthouse, I almost found my own country.
At the edge of a field, I gathered the neck of a buckskin
into my arms and whispered, where were you all this time?
Alone all this time, and bored with being alone,
I have been walking all afternoon
at the edge of a town where the language is, only to me,
the music of mountain people.
In Yugoslavia, I am learning the words for greeting and goodbye.
Everything else is the language of the silent woman
who walks beside me.
I want the mountains to be builded golden,
and my loved ones, the cathedrals,
to be builded by time's love back to their gray.
As the gray woman grows old, that gray woman
who gave us some cheese and whispered
her affectionate sound to my love and me,
wandering silent in the breeze of a strange language,
at home with each other, saying nothing, listening
to a new word for mountain, to a new word for cathedral,
to a new word for cheese, to a word
beyond words for cathedrals and homes."