English Original
what remains of her remains ocean stars
Modern Haiku, 56:1, 2025
Elmedin Kadric
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
她遺骸的殘留海洋之星
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
她遗骸的残留海洋之星
Bio Sketch
Elmedin Kadric was born in Novi Pazar, Serbia, but writes out of Helsingborg, Sweden. His first collection, buying time (2017), was published by Red Moon Press.
This one-line haiku works exceptionally well, carrying a deep, haunting resonance.
ReplyDeleteBy omitting punctuation, the poem creates a compelling ambiguity at its center, allowing the word "remains" to function as both noun and verb. The phrase opens onto two readings:
I What remains of her / remains ocean stars. What is left of her endures in, or has transformed into, the stars of the sea.
II What remains of her remains / ocean stars. Her physical remnants—or what survives of her memory—are the ocean stars.
The poem’s compressed, single-line form allows these meanings to flow into one another, enacting the very dissolution and transformation it evokes.
Furthermore, the juxtaposition of "remains," with its associations of loss, bone, and mortality, and "ocean stars," with its intimations of aquatic beauty, cosmic light, and renewal, creates a striking tension between death and continuance. Rather than resolving this tension, the poem lets its ambiguity offer a quiet consolation: what is lost may not simply disappear, but may persist in another form, woven into the vastness of the natural world.