Maja Herman Sekulić Poetry | Influential Serbian poet

A Cloud in a Skirt

A Manifesto of a New, Feminine, Futurism

    

    Canto I

Once I was a cloud

While in Osaka

Drinking sake

And thinking of Mayakovsky

And being simultaneously

Maria and Lily

Once I was a guest in a geisha's house

A geisha then broke out of the house

Running after me to a taxi

Bringing me a fan

And then she quickly walked away

Trapped in a kimono

In a knot of silk

In the chatter of her sandals

With those tiny steps

Was it love?

Once in Rome I didn't dream

Of Caesar or Mark Anthony 

But of Keats and Shelley

I dreamed of Rome at dusk,

The sharp outlines of cypresses,

Dilapidated houses,

Bluish melancholia or

The history of nostalgia?

Once I watched

Sharks make love

How they fell to the bottom of the sea

Armless

They held each other in pairs

in a tight embrace

not breathing through their gills

Paired, they do not breathe, they do not swim

Is it love, an urge or a small

deadly joke?

Once I, a woman,  neither big nor small,

Had in my soul

Chirping songs

Not a single gray hair

And not the tenderness of old age 

I had

Not the pleasure of a lover

But an artist

Not the pleasure of teaching

But giving

Not the pleasure of a savior

But a sinner

Not the pleasure of a strange land

But the proximity of the white city

Once I deafened the world

With the power of my voice

I walked, beauty alone

I was, I existed

Like a cloud in a skirt

Unfathomable

I walked over the rooftops of New York

Ungraspable -

My own! 

 A Cloud in a Skirt 

 Canto II

Manifesto of a New, Feminine, Futurism

     One day the wave will crash so

     That no one will be able to save themselves

     In this country left without a spine

     Where women are killed, tortured

     While in the name of false religion

     Children are taught nonsense

    

Once at night I

wanted to lean on

To feel my softness

On your chest

Once in me

From your hands

A heart was breaking

And was it love,

or was it not?

 

Once I was crazy 

about you

Twirling, fluttering 

like a white cloud

I crawled under 

your skin

And now I've gone

Into myself, escaped

I myself have turned into a cloud again, 

but now a heavy one

So that I could be rain, 

a downpour, a flood,

And not a drop, 

not a tear -

I am!

Esergo
“I walk, beauty alone” — not as an adornment, but as a force, a stride, a manifesto.
Critical Commentary

- Mauro Montacchiesi
 
Maja Herman Sekulić's A Cloud in a Skirt I is a lyrical manifesto — a feminine futurism woven in silken paradoxes and timeless identity shifts. The poem recalls to mind temporalities and geographies, moving along an enveloping and dynamic path from Osaka to Rome to New York, where the speaker redefines, according to new perspectives, the concepts of womanhood, sensuality, artistry and love. The title itself, echoing Mayakovsky’s epithet for Lilya Brik, signals a dialogic engagement with past avant-gardes. Yet here, futurism is made intimate and reclaimed: the “cloud” becomes the metaphor of an ungraspable female self, eternal yet transitory, monumental yet soft. Her voice, once deafening the world, is now sovereign, ethereal. Throughout the poem, the speaker slips into multiple selves — Maria, Lily, geisha, artist, sinner — without dissolving into fragmentation. Rather, it is an expansion. This elasticity of identity is what enables the poem to transmute every scene — from erotic shark-embrace to cypress dreams in Rome — into a philosophical inquiry: is this love, or something else? Sekulić offers no resolutions. Instead, she builds a ladder of moments: poetic, historical, intimate. Each rung climbs toward an empowered yet elusive femaleness — “my own.” The poem is not a cloud. It is the thunder within it.
 
Haiku
 
Sake dreams unlace
 
a fan spins in tiny steps
cloud skirts kiss rooftops.
 
Aphorism
 
To walk like a cloud is not to drift —
but to rise unfollowed.
 
Poem Inspired by the Text
(entitled “Cloud Manifesto”)
 
I was the sea
before the shark's caress,
a roof before
New York rose upward.
 
I did not love —
I unloved,
unleashed silk
from history's corset.
 
I walked like myth,
my heels forgot the ground,
my skirt was thunder.
 
Diallage
 
Where Mayakovsky sought revolution in futurist geometry, Sekulić folds it into silk, femininity, ambiguity. This is not a rejection but a reorientation. The female voice is not made for slogans — it dreams, meanders, breaks, sings. Her “cloud” does not vanish — it surrounds. Her “skirt” is not a costume — it becomes the storm's drapery.
 
 
Theatrical Monologue
(Stream of Consciousness of the Feminine Voice in the Poem)
 
I was Maria.
Or Lily.
Or both.
I was sake and sandalwood and sake, concrete and cypress,
sinner and shark, poetess and geisha.
My voice didn’t echo — it drowned the silence.
I held no one, yet I held all things.
Rome didn’t whisper Caesar — it hummed Keats.
New York wasn’t steel — it was mine.
I didn’t love. I didn’t need to.
I was the feeling before the name for it.
I walked.
And the air rearranged itself.
 
Paralipomenon
 
Had the poem ended in the kimono, we would have read nostalgia. Had it ended in Rome, we would have sighed. But it ends in movement — not just in space, but in meaning. Sekulić does not allow us to settle. She walks over rooftops, not under history.
 
Final Didactic-Critical Note
 
A Cloud in a Skirt I is a potent intersection of identity, geography, gender, and poetic legacy. Sekulić's writing defies borders — be they national, literary, or existential. The cloud becomes a mode of being: ephemeral but immense, gentle but rebellious. This is not merely a poem. It is an assertion. A woman’s becoming, and beyond.