Dejan Stojanovic
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Poems
    • Being Late
    • Sadness and Happiness
    • Task of a Poet
    • A Star Deep In the Mind
    • An Island in the Mind
    • Ancient Roman Villa
    • A New Friend
    • A Woman in the Garden of Light
    • Afterlife Light >
      • All Women in One
  • Poems 2
    • Love in Arizona
    • Rain
    • I Smell You Everywhere
    • Staying Crazy
    • Muse I >
      • Muse II
    • Flower
    • Ghazal of Love
    • Path
    • Song in the Garden
    • Siren
    • Chance >
      • Unusual Love
      • First Love
      • It Is So Simple
  • Poets
    • Walt Whitman
    • Emily Dickinson
    • W. B. Yeats
    • Robert Frost
    • Wallace Stevens
    • T. S. Eliot
    • E. E. Cummings
  • Saul Bellow
  • Steve Tesich
  • Blog
  • Charles Simic
  • Home
  • Gallery
  • Contact
  • Being Late
  • A Man and the Sea
  • Poets
  • E. E. Cummings
  • All Women in One
  • A Man with a Guitar
  • A Night Worth a Life
  • Amateurs
  • An Omnipotent Eye
  • Big Dreams
  • Birthplace
  • Big Miniature
  • Break Up
  • Bright Moments
  • Dancing of Sounds
  • Death
  • Dictionary of Sounds
  • Dogs and Men
  • Don Juan
  • Don Quixote
  • Early Retirement
  • End of the Labyrinth
  • Memory and Oblivion
  • Old and New
  • People
  • Possibility
  • Reality
  • Silent Equality
  • Simplicity
  • Song of Light
  • Song within a Song
  • Sound Bombs
  • Sounds of Imagination
  • Star
  • Stupidity
  • The Book of Books
  • The Kiss of Light and Darkness
  • The Land Beyond
  • The Light from the Mind
  • The Rise of a Barbarian
  • The Source
  • Two Stars
  • Understanding
  • Unending Life
  • Early Morning
  • Knowledge
  • Mastery
  • Sounds of Life and Love
  • Sounds of Love and Hate
  • Dejan Stojanovic - Poetry in Translation
  • Amazon's Dejan Stojanovic Page
  • The Sun Watches the Sun by Dejan Stojanovic
  • The Creator by Dejan Stojanovic
  • Dejan Stojanovic - Quotes
  • Open Library
  • The Sign and Its Children
  • Non-clickable Page

Don Quixote


We dream and fight
With demons real and imagined
We only live if we dream;
We grow from our dreams
From our own La Mancha.
Don Quixote is not an imaginary person
He is as real as Alexander the Great
His Dulcinea—as real as Cleopatra

His windmills are as real as the Library of Alexandria;
As real as scores of languages dead and forgotten;
As real as Attila, or lost Constantinople.
His windmills are lost Ayah Sofias

His battles had to be won
By sleepy emperors
Too busy to wage them.
We need Don Quixote and La Mancha.

When the whole past is but a phantom,
When many a city fell,
The idea remained—
Stronger than any city, stronger than any empire

Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso;
From Dally and El Greco;
From the gloomy View of Toledo.
He was born before Cervantes

Those in Argentina, Mexico and Peru,
Colombia and the Caribbean
Bear La Mancha and Quixote in their hearts
For he is an ultimate and overlooked Don Juan.

Marquez was not born in Colombia.
He was born in Macondo,
And his Macondo is his La Mancha.
Fuentes and Cortazar are from La Mancha too.

Neruda had his first dream
First meeting with the Moon and the Sun
In sunny La Mancha, hiding in his heart
Where he learned how to sing like a nightingale

Don Quixote is not just Don Quixote
La Mancha is not just geography
It is our personal territory—
Terra Nostra

All places come and go.
History will be erased in the universal purgatory.
Dreams are our only geography—
Our native land.

-Dejan Stojanovic






Wikipedia PoemHunter Poetry in English Poetry in Serbian Poetry in French Seven Poets Poets