This is one called "Sarajevo Moonlight."
Looking over my shoulder at you this morning,
I'm listening to the tender baritone
voice of Radovan Karadzic in the little church of St.
Michael, the apostle.
Radovan is telling us--
us being myself and the poet Susan Ludvigson,
is telling us what a sweet lovable place this family church
of his is and how the light of history has shone on it twice.
He narrates how St. Michael's was burned to the ground
and how the sultans--
with the sultan's permission it was rebuilt.
The catch was that it couldn't exceed its previous breath
or height.
The heights of nights I measure by your presence
are incalculable.
A gift of light so precious that the only way to weigh it
would be to shine on the scales of fishes in the sea.
The deepening blueness of your eyes in this Islamicized
town of such cold weather breeds a frosty ring
around my icy view of you.
Now, our host as Fulbright poets for that
what eight or nine days in Sarajevo was Radovan Karadzic.
And this is the same man who coined the phrase
ethnic cleansing, and who is the leader of the Bosnian Serbs,
and who is a war criminal.
He's also a wonderful poet.
He's a doctor.
I watched him one afternoon at a luncheon,
somebody had a heart attack, some man fell out before
and he went over, excused himself,
he was reading us his poetry.
Administered mouth to mouth resuscitation
and checked the man out, called an ambulance, all of this.
And he was taking us around in this instance,
telling us about his family church, St. Michael's.
And I remember asking him about the Ali Pasha
mosque, which was virtually right across the street.
And he looked at me and he said, mosque,
I am not knowing so many things about mosques,
but there are books I can refer you to.
So when somebody does something crazy and you think back always
your brain goes back through everything about them.
And that was the only hint that I
had that this horror would develop later
under his leadership in which they
tried their best to wipe out all of the Muslims
in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
All autumn, he was reading a poem that he translated,
all autumn.
I said, what does this mean, all autumn?
Is all autumn is one day when is all autumn--
one day before is winter, it is summer in autumn.
One day, later, there is winter but one day
is all autumn, no summer, no winter.
I understood what he was talking about.
I only share this with you just to say that we've grown up
in this horrible in many ways 20th century in which carnage
has been monumental.
And we see the documents-- documentaries
on the History Channel, we read the history books
the Holocaust, the dreadful things
that went on that go on in Somalia, and Zaire, and Bosnia,
and just about everywhere around the globe these days.
And we like to think that that's not us,
that-- that's somebody else doing that we're not
separate from the people that are doing that is we're
all interconnected so intimately that I think that
in the beginnings of the next century,
particularly the younger ones, who are here in the audience.
I think they will have to be a dialogue escalated to a higher
level of trying to understand these qualities in human beings,
we are angels and demons simultaneously.
And we have to take the responsibility for both.
That's the end of my little Unitarian lecture.
[LAUGH]
I had to say all that.