“We are Serbian children! Shoot!”
The dramatic framework of the poem “A Bloody Fairytale” is the element that makes it an exceptional poem. In this case, the event is the not the usual death by accident, ill health or old age. This poem memorializes the deaths of seven thousands (7,000) of schoolchildren, who were selected, with incomprehensible malice, especially because they were children and their deaths would punctuate more fully the German call to end resistance. The only allusion to something of a military nature in the poem is the use of the word “cheta”. This word is usually used to describe a group of soldiers. With her line “a company of small ones”, referring to the children, Maksimovic makes a particularly ironic statement: the innocent children are being punished in a manner so brutal it is not fit for even the soldiers of the enemy. She compares the children's death to that of a martyr and she respectfully refrains from mentioning those responsible for their death, as it would ruin the forlorn and grief-stricken tone of the poem with anger. Rage will not bring the little martyrs back. All that remains is to immortalize them with an appropriate lamentation.
BLOODY FAIRY TALE by Desanka Maksimovic
It happened in a land of farmers on hilly Balkan
far, far away;
a troop of students
died martyred
on one single day.
They were all born
in the same year.
For all of them, the school days were the same:
They were all taken
to the same festivals with cheer,
they were all vaccinated
until the last name,
and they all died on the same day.
It happened in a land of farmers on hilly Balkan
far, far away;
a troop of students
died martyred
on one single day.
And only fifty-five minutes
prior the death moment,
a small troop of fidgets
sat beside their school desks
solving the same hard math quest:
“If a traveler goes by foot,
how much time he needs to rest...”
and so on.
Their thoughts were filled
with same figures and tags
and there was a countless amount
of senseless As and Fs
in their notebooks and in their bags.
They were squeezing
a whole bunch of secrets that mattered--
either patriotic or a love letter--
on the bottom of their pockets.
And everyone of them supposed
that he would for a long time,
for a very, very long time
run under the blue sky--
until all math quests on the world
were done and gone by.
It happened in a land of farmers on hilly Balkan
far, far away;
a troop of students
died martyred
on the same day.
Whole rows of boys
took each other’s hands
and leaving the last school class
went to the execution quietly,
as the death was nothing but a smile.
All friends in rows were,
at the same moment,
lifted up to the eternal domicile.
Comments