Excerpts: Karadzic's poems

The publisher will not say how he got hold of the poems

A book of what is said to be new poetry by fugitive Bosnian war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic has been launched in Serbia.

The man accused of genocide against Bosnian Muslims largely writes about nature in the poems - said by a BBC translator to be as "bad in the original as they sound in the English translation" - but there are also frequent references to war and violence.

Three of the poems, including one called Sarajevo, follow here:

MAD SPEAR

Measure your steps, your hand's twists
That spear you throw is mad
The landscapes awaiting it are full of no names and no reason.

Something like a chill is nesting within you
That spear, that stretched arm, glows in your head
You feel that mortal metal, its presence
You don't think of it and it is still a metal.

You think of it and it leaves you as super metal
As metal which lives but is no metal
And the difference is reason enough to become a set of events.

It sets landscapes unseen to its serpent-like spine
It changes and glows while doing it
Does it only threaten or glisten for its beauty's sake
Full of love for the blade which is itself?

Brought to madness thinking about its purpose
And becomes a hero
Before the gap, before the irreversible one that stays.

Twittering from time to time and also tired and vulnerable
It always returns to your abandoned self
Devastated by the new finding.

ST VASILIJE OSTROSKI

Do you see your hand in the ploughed fields
Below you?
Peace is growing again and grapes are stiff, are ripe
Only the snail, not happy, remembers your power
The powerless bushes crave for your existence
It is still ruled by the wind
It still smells of ancient smell

You scared painting stopping halfway from the earth and sky
You rock tied to the sky
Your fear denies the blue of the space in your head
Everything inside the heights has the need for prayer
It stands for the good of the plants and is against the weed
It stands for the breeze coming from the other side

Eternally, under the abyss as an option
This trepidation will last, spoken as the clearness
Which grows and overgrows the dazed nature

Can you see your assertion to the sun, being at your rock?
The flowers still make the same mistake
(This sin, this incest, do they crave for salvation?)
The flowers still do not utter words of complaint
What you have come to together is getting used to the roots
In the earth and skies

SARAJEVO

I hear the misfortune threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.

The town burns like a piece of incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.
Empty suits slide down the town.
Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!

Calm. The army of armed poplar tree
Marches up the hill, within itself.
The aggressor air storms our souls
and once you are human and then you are an air creature.

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:
What does the black metal in the garage have for us?
Look how fear turned into a spider
Looking for the answer at his computer.