“What If” in “What We Are When We Are / Kaj smo, ko smo”
What If 
My father would have liked to be the Spanish king,
Mom—Humphrey Bogart. Grandfather would have liked
to be the chef de cuisine on the Russian front,
instead of cooked sawdust and snow bread
beef stroganoff for everybody.
Great-grandmother held the four corners of the house together,
so that her quarrelsome relatives wouldn’t do her in.
When she saw in the newspaper a picture of the last
Hawaiian princess, she dreamt about the gorgeous hat
of the heir to the throne, about the islands
which she would know how to hold together;
the Americans would not have dethroned her.
My great-uncle, before the army of his brain
turned against him and burned down his
towns and villages, wanted to be Gagarin.
He was not happy going into space, even less going home.
Grandmother, who wished she had been born under the sign
of the flower, after her death arranges her family graves in
her cemetery—and what would you like to be,
when you graduate from the school of dreams?
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