After twelve years he returned
gaunt awkward acting
excessively polite
What he tells beneath his breath
is light and darkness
we know it now
from books - but yesterday?
At the table he still has a kind of gaze
that's not his own that catches him
at every word in reddened eyelids
where those inhuman years
lie hidden
A repatriate from Vorkuta
I still see him
His eyes turned lifelessly
to the place from which the light does not return
Whatever you say about him
his half-open lips remain unsaid
His hands speak at the table by the oak tree
though his words define a form
that does not admit outsiders
that remains a prison shield
despite his return
As if he longed to enter swirling clouds
that are in fact no more.
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Mieczyslaw
Jastrun wrote an influential (and slightly fictionalized) book on Adam
Mickiewicz. No wonder, then, that this poem is an easily identifiable
echo of the great Romantic's A Prisoner's
Return. |
| Echoes of The
Waste Land appear in Jastrun as well: the hiacynth, the stone, and
the water, ushering in an imagery of death and nothingness, are a very
direct reference to Parts
One and Four
of Eliot's poem. |
Light from Another World
One life has passed
I passed over what hurt the most
in silence
I forgot about the changes
they grew pale like stars at dawn
shining in leafless trees
Light from another world
embraced me
A hyacinth's keen scent
And nothing - like a stone thrown into water
nothing - like water turned to stone
frozen by the morning cold
One life has passed
I passed over silence in silence
I forgot
on this planet where it was so hard
to square endless otherness
with my own brief time
A steep staircase opened beneath me
leading to a tunnel underground
where letters
on the wall spelled
the saving phrase: "Way Out."
|
Mantegna's Christ
Mantegna's Christ, stretched on the ground,
With enormous foreshortened feet.
The epoch shows us its feet the same way,
Pierced, magnified, foreshortened by centuries,
The feet of a corpse, whom we, the living,
Try to revive with our breath and bathe in raining tears--
The feet of the Lazarus whom God became
To avoid dying in his awful glory.
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| Waiting in
line, queuing - for ham, for meat, for oranges, for shoes, for fridges,
for two-week package holidays in Bulgaria - was the major nightmare of
everyday life in communist economy. |
Waiting in Line
Newlyweds with white flowers
came out of the church and caught a cab, their ears
still full of the organ's benediction
Here though there's noise and exhaust fumes
Women wrapped in sheepskins boots to their knees
teased hair beneath their scarves
broad-hipped wrinkled not from age
but from failed lives Housewives used
to scolding in lines scrounging for the food
that dark kitchens and tables are waiting for
And if they don't bring home meat the man gets mad
who's borne for hours the factory's brunt the rumble
of the conveyor belt the emptiness
after the night shift when the day begins
and sleep seeps through shaded windows into bed
Tomorrow is today and the way between days is narrow
So they've learned how to complain in voices sharp as razors
to elbow into lines to borrow kids for extra portions.
Fertile at least Their hips remember the births
of boys grown tall and thin who snicker at the queuers
even at those who are mothers of life
They'll wait in this crush until the doors swing open
wide as a window on a sunny day.
|
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
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