Re ghosts.

Back in Belgrade after the thing they now call the balkans conflict. A friend who himself had been transplanted from an area of lush green beauty by the sea and a family home and farm where the life was dictated by the seasons stared up at his new home of smoke and concrete, a tower block of proportions and disorder that is only known in eastern europe. His family had all had to move with threats of certain death from a place to this. Mother was dead, but father grandfather and grandmother all hung on as shadows and ghosts in this new place which affronted their very existence. Undead. Granmother and grandfather used to climb down the stairs from the summit daily to sit on a bench on a green verge by a main road. The lift had long since begun a new life as a home for rubbish excrement and dogs. The verge beneath their bench was now the farm, a stick digging a furrow amongst the litter. Hushed tones as they talked of the planting, the season, the crops that they should be harvesting. A daily event, the rain of Belgrade to them was a good thing for the seeds they had planted, too wet for a harvest. The sun was good for the plumbs in the orchard, September a time for slivovic and jam.Conversations and love of a time and place, now gone for ever in real life, but that was all they had now. Darkness would begin to come and they would help each other from the bench to begin the ascent, after their day on the soil. Two tiny pieces of something precious stranded in the mess of blackness and unnatural disorder.