For ten years, no one saw Mihailo Macar. He lived on bread and rainwater. His beard grew to his chest. His hands became knots of scar and callus. He spoke to no one except the stones. And the stones spoke back.
At seventeen, Mihailo left the mountain for the city. He walked sixty kilometers with a sack of dried meat, a hammer, and a set of chisels his father had forged for him. The city was called Gradina, a place of soot-blackened buildings, trolley cars that screamed on their tracks, and a river so polluted it looked like liquid asphalt. He found work in a marble yard, cutting slabs for tombstones. mihailo macar
“Don’t just stare,” his father would say, handing him a chisel. “Make it into something useful. A trough. A millstone. A doorstep.” For ten years, no one saw Mihailo Macar
When the poet returned a year later, Mihailo was gone. The church was empty except for the pieces he had left behind. They were not statues in any traditional sense. They were geometries—spheres that were not quite round, cubes with one side soft as flesh, pillars that leaned as if exhausted. And in the center of the nave, where the altar had once stood, was his final work. His hands became knots of scar and callus
And on the base of each one, in letters no larger than a grain of rice, he carves the same phrase in the old dialect of Kruševo: “I am still eating. The stone is still speaking.”