Dobro jutro, stric Pondeljek

This is a teaching poem in disguise — a delightful way to learn the days of the week. Instead of a dry list, it turns each day into a character in a little village world: Monday is an uncle (stric), Tuesday a godfather (boter), Wednesday a neighbour (soseda), Friday another uncle — an ujec, a mother’s brother — and one by one they fetch each other along the road. Thursday comes for Tuesday, the two call on Friday, Saturday joins at the crossroads, all building toward the arrival, on the day of joy, of the grandest character of all: Lady Sunday.

Because the days come in order and each leads to the next, a child learns the shape of the week almost without noticing. The poem’s flourish of nonsense is Saturday’s doing: she brings a butcher, they slaughter a mosquito, and from it they make krvavice, klobasice and pečenice — blood sausages, little sausages and roasting sausages — for the feast, a joke that turns the coming of Sunday into a celebration worth the whole week’s preparation. A shorter variant keeps the mosquito and drops the sausages.

Slovenian kindergartens, where it is recited under the title Dnevi v tednu (“Days of the Week”), credit it to Albert Širok (1895–1985), a poet, translator and editor who also published a collection of children’s verse. We have not found the poem’s original publication, so its date is not known, and the text here is the one passed around in kindergartens rather than a printed edition — one copy reads “k stricu Petku” (Uncle Friday) where the others have “k ujcu Petku”. Either way, it remains a favourite for exactly the reason it was written: it makes the calendar into a story.