“dodging snipers”
Stanza 1, line 6
The verb dodging is casual, the language of a game or a crowded pavement, and it is attached to the threat of being shot. Harrison slips the danger into a list of errands, between the bread ration and the water, so the reader registers how routine the risk of death has become. Snipers firing at civilians in the streets were a daily danger in the besieged city.
“that’s just not the case”
Stanza 1, line 11
The turning point of the poem arrives in the plainest possible words. After ten lines building the expectation of empty, frightened streets, the speaker dismisses it with a spoken, almost shrugging phrase. The flat tone makes the young people’s defiance sound natural rather than heroic, and the dash at the end of the line, with the rhyme that carries across the stanza break, throws the reader forward into the evening.
“impossible to mark / as Muslim, Serb or Croat”
Stanza 2, lines 13-14
To mark someone is to identify them, and in a war it is also to single them out as a target. In the dark the walkers can be neither. The three communities whose divisions drove the war are listed evenly, joined by or, with nothing to tell them apart, which suggests the identities the war was fought over cannot even be seen. The darkness that endangers the city also makes it one.
“tender radar”
Stanza 3, line 21
An unexpected pairing. Radar is military technology, used to detect aircraft and guide weapons, and in a city under bombardment it belongs to the language of war. Harrison softens it with tender, turning it into the intuition by which the boy senses the girl likes him. War has entered even the vocabulary of love, but here it is used to find a partner, not a target.
“I think”
Stanza 4, line 27
The speaker first appears as I in line 25, and two lines later he admits uncertainty. The small hedge, set off by commas, is a reporter’s honesty: he can see what the boy is about to do but cannot know it. It keeps the poem grounded in observation, and makes the reader trust the terrible facts that follow in the next few lines.
“Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue”
Stanza 4, line 30
The most violent line in the poem is also one of its most compressed. The alliteration of mortars and massacred sounds like repeated impact, and the victims are reduced to a queue, the very activity of the first stanza. The attack the poem appears to recall, on people queuing for bread in May 1992, was blamed on the Bosnian Serb forces besieging the city, who denied it. Naming the mortars as Serb is a clear judgement.
“blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread”
Stanza 4, line 31
Dunked is a homely word, for dipping food into a drink, and fusing it with blood makes the horror more intimate, not less. Bread has been the poem’s symbol of survival since the daily ration of line 5; here it becomes evidence of slaughter. The line rhymes with the dead at the end of the next line, so the couplet locks food and death together.
“bomber’s eye”
Stanza 4, line 38
The clear, starry sky that gives the couple their view is, the speaker notes, ideal for an attacker. Reducing the attacker to a single watching eye makes the sky itself threatening. Harrison will not let the romantic night be only romantic: the conditions for beauty are exactly the conditions for danger, and a clear evening is a frightening one in Sarajevo.
“fragments of the splintered Pleiades”
Stanza 4, line 40
The Pleiades, the Seven Sisters of Greek myth, are one of the best-known sights of the night sky. Reflected in a rain-filled shell-hole they are broken up, and Harrison describes them with the vocabulary of shrapnel. Beauty is present, but shattered. One reading sees hope, light filling the city’s wounds; the more unsettling reading is that the war has broken even the stars.
“death-deep, death-dark wells”
Stanza 4, line 41
The repeated compound, heavy with d sounds, makes the puddles seem bottomless. Wells are sources of water and life, and the poem has already shown Sarajevans hauling water upstairs, but these were dug by mortars and are measured in death. The doubled phrase slows the line to a solemn pace just before the poem turns back to the couple.
“candlelit café”
Stanza 5, line 44
Candles are a necessity in a city that went months without electricity, yet the phrase carries every romantic association of a first date. Coming after the violence of stanza 4, the domestic vocabulary of candles and coffee softens the tone. Harrison lets both meanings stand, hardship and romance together, which is the poem’s whole argument in two words.
“AID flour sacks refilled with sand”
Stanza 5, line 46
The last line compresses the whole siege. Sacks that brought flour, the city’s bread, as humanitarian aid have become sandbags against the shells, and the capitals probably mimic the lettering stamped on them. The final rhyme joins the held hand of line 45 to this sand, so the poem ends with love sheltered by the tools of war: tender, but not safe.