Can you stop the wind

Can you stop the wind that comes from the mounds

rushes through the boas, raises a cloud over the wilds,

grabs the eaves of the houses, the rugs from the carts,

takes down the gates, the fences and the children on the meadows—

in my hometown?

Can you stop Bistrica, which comes furiously in the spring,

shatters its ice, the supports of bridges

and comes out of the trough and drags, cloudy, mischievous -

the houses and the gardens and the cattle of the people—

in my hometown?

Can you stop the wine once it has boiled?

in the barrels, huge, towering, saturated with wafting moisture,

on which "black" and "white" are written in Cyrillic letters -

in the cold, stone cellars bequeathed by our ancestors -

in my hometown?

How will you stop me - the voluptuous, the wanderer, the disobedient -

the native sister of wind, water and wine,

for whom the unattainable, the spacious, is a lure,

where he always dreams of roads — unreached, unpassed, —

how will you stop me?