You can thank Gavrilo
for your existence.
And this Serbian’s
piercing shot.
I should really
give credit
to his mother.
Marija lost six
of her sickly children
in infancy. But not Gavrilo.
Sometimes the odds work
in your favour,
in ways we never fathom.
Like microbes
on a comet
made of ice,
one that strikes a planet—
which would other-
wise just stay dead.
But that was the Archean,
and we’re discussing the
assassin—of Archduke
Ferdinand.
They say his father Petar
never cussed, imbibed the
numb of booze. Maybe Gavrilo
would have been kinder,
much less bitter
if he had. Being forced
by his farmer-father
to hold it in.
Serenity fucking now.
Speaking of the farms,
they’re where
his parents met. He gave her his
head of lettuce. She
offered him some flagon
of the cow.
It was the first time
in a decade
it wasn’t sour.
They say
she’d won his heart
that very day.
Probability
can work its wonders
when it wants.
I watch dominoes
digging trenches in
Passchendaele.
Become a laurel
for Jesse Owens in Berlin.
And there in Bergen-
Belsen, mutate to the typhus—
which failed to show some mercy
to the Franks.
Every face there is
might very well
never be
without the bullet.
At least in its present form.
I think of
Anne Frank’s journal—her last
in a series of seven; bopping
along to Richard Starkey’s
band in ’64, the year I
would have been born.
She wrote they were called
The Heifers,
had some singer named Mickey
Jagger,
guzzling down the milk
as though it were pints
of frothing beer,
thinking fuck it all the while,
my life is going nowhere
really fast.
Andreas Gripp
February 25, 2025
RF Image of Gavrilo Princip
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