First Cords

Before she started going to school in Dubrovnik, Vesna began composing rhymes with rather unusual word combinations. In Zagreb when she was 10, she wrote a poem from which she can only remember the final, mystical verse:

“And the heart is beating in harmony with the pulse of the Universe.”

Then on spur of the moment when she was 11, much to her own surprise (and even slight apprehension), she wrote a poem in free verse-“A Lost Pearl.”

A LOST PEARL

Yesterday the day was happily smiling,
and today I’ve lost a pearl in the grass.
And I know trying to find it is in vain.

But I also know
that somebody else will come tomorrow

and find my pearl,
and dream the lost dream to the end.

Convinced that it was someone else’s poem, Vesna had been waiting for years to find the real author thinking that she had read the poem somewhere and unintentionally copied it. The song couldn’t have been the experience work of such a little girl, certainly not in Zagreb at that difficult time when such creative visions were very unlikely. Besides, she was wondering where the idea of finishing the lost dream to the end came from. She was hiding “A Lost Pearl” like an egg belonging to some other high-soaring bird that accidentally and inexplicably landed in her own nest. Then in a dream many years later, Vesna recognized that she was the author of the poem. With great relief, she included it in a selection of her own poetry. When it was published, Tonko Maroević, a poet, renowned scholar and literary and painting critic, wrote:
“The definiteness of the statements, purity of formulation, and clarity of vision are indeed astonishing.”

Vesna considers this poem to be the first of 108 movements in the symphony of her life, the lite motif of which is contained in this first movement. In it there was a clear awareness of how little she knew and that her destiny would be a search for Self-knowledge. Through intuitive understanding and the revelations of the subsequent 108 movements, she reaches the end of the dream. Where before there were two-self and other- there is now only One. Where there was past, present and future time, there is only the eternal now.