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1.
When, by error, I jumped on a wrong bus,
people in it, as usual, were returning from work.
The bus rushed down an unknown street,
O Holy Cross Street, no longer Holy Cross,
where are your antique shops, bookstores, students?
Where are you, the dead?
The memory of you peters out.
Then the bus stopped
on a dug-up square.
Old skeleton of a four-story house
anticipated the verdict of fate.
I got off in the square
in a working district,
Where gray walls become silver,
reminiscing.
People were hurrying home,
and I did not dare ask them the way.
In my childhood, had I not come to this house?
I returned like a man
who had gone for medicine
and come home twenty years later.
My wife asked me where I'd been.
My children asked me where I'd been.
I said nothing and sweated like a mouse.
2.
Squares turn like cobras,
houses stand like peacocks,
give me any old stone,
and I'll be back in my city.
Standing, a thoughtless pillar,
under the candelabrum,
I praise, admire, and curse
on abra- and abracadabra.
Heroically, I venture
under the splendid columns
and pay no heed to the puppets
of Gallux, painted for coffins.
Here youngsters come for ice cream!
All of them are young, and yet
their memories reach the ruins;
girls will soon have babies.
What's in the stone endures,
pathos and rubbish together,
here, future poets of Warsaw,
you'll learn your A's, B's, and C's.
Love all this most naturally,
I loved, I loved other stones,
gray and really magnificent,
sounding of reminiscence.
Squares turn like cobras,
houses stand like peacocks,
give me any old stone,
and I'll be back in my city.
3.
"Today our sky is not empty."
(from a political speech)
It was dawn, and at dawn I heard the sound of jets,
very expensive, no doubt, expensive, but still we must . . .
When we don't want to speak about our earth simply,
we say, then we say: our sky's not empty.
People walk here anyhow and dress in denim,
women grow old here early, very early....
When we don't want to speak about our earth simply,
we say, then we say: our sky's not empty.
Beyond the ocean an apocalypse curls in clouds,
and here a passerby, a passerby kneels down....
When we don't want to speak about the earth simply,
the kneeling man says: the sky's not empty.
Here a legion of boys lets out a cloud of pigeons,
and a girl is tying a sky-blue kerchief....
When we don't want to speak about the earth simply,
we say, then we say: the sky's not empty.
4.
From villages and little towns, they come in carts
to build a foundry and dream out a city,
dig out of the earth a new Eldorado.
With an army of pioneers, a gathered crowd,
they jam in barns, barracks, and hostels,
walk heavily and whistle loudly in the muddy streets:
the great migration, the twisted ambition,
with a string on their necks-the Czestochowa cross,
three floors of swear-words, a feather pillow,
a gallon of vodka, and the lust for girls.
Distrustful soul, torn out of the village soil,
half-awakened and already half-mad,
in words silent, but singing, singing songs,
the huge mob, pushed suddenly
out of medieval darkness: un-human Poland,
howling with boredom on December nights....
In garbage baskets and on hanging ropes,
boys fly like cats on night walls,
girls' hostels, the secular nunneries,
burst with rutting--And then the "Duchesses"
ditch the foetus--the Vistula flows here....
The great migration building industry,
unknown to Poland, but known to history,
fed with big empty words, and living
wildly from day to day despite the preachers,
in coal gas and in slow, continuous suffering,
the working class is shaped out of it.
There is a lot of refuse. So far, there are Frits.
5.
This also happens: a brown cloud of smoke
rises above the mine that's been set afire,
the shaft's been cut off, the subterranean suffering
never will be told, the dark shaft now a coffin,
the saboteur has blood and bones and hands,
one hundred families cry, two hundred,
they write in papers or they do not write,
and only broken smoke stays in the air.
6.
At a railway station
Miss Jadzia's at the counter,
she's so nice when she yawns,
she's so nice when she pours...
ATTENTION! THE ENEMY PLIES YOU WITH VODKA
You'll be poisoned here for sure,
Miss Jadzia'll pull off your boots,
she's so nice when she yawns,
she's so nice when she pours....
ATTENTION! THE ENEMY PLIES YOU WITH VODKA
Do not go, my boy, to Nowa Huta
or you'll be poisoned on the way,
take warning from the treacherous poster
and the national fish in your stomach....
ATTENTION! THE ENEMY PLIES YOU WITH VODKA
7.
I'll not believe, my friend, that lions are calves,
I'll not believe, my friend, that calves are lions,
I'll not believe, my friend, in magic curses
or in reasons kept under glass,
but I believe that the table has four legs,
but I believe that the fifth leg is a chimera,
and when chimeras come together, my friend,
one dies slowly of heart disease.
8.
It's true,
when the brass trumpets of boredom
jam the great educational aim,
when vultures of abstraction eat out of our brains,
when students are shut off in textbooks without windows,
when our language is reduced to thirty magic formulas,
when the lamp of imagination dies out,
when the good people from the moon
refuse us the right to have taste,
it's true,
then we are in danger of becoming ignorant and dull.
9.
They fished the drowned man out of the Vistula.
They found a piece of paper in his pocket:
"My sleeve is right,
my button is wrong,
My collar is wrong,
but my strap is right."
They buried him under a willow tree.
10.
In a freshly plastered street of new buildings,
lime dust circles and a cloud rushes through the sky.
Pulverizers, rolling in the street, press the surface,
transplanted chestnut trees bloom and sing in twilight.
Little and big children scatter under the chestnut trees,
dragging wood for fuel from half-pulled-down scaffolds.
The staircase is full of names, melodious, feminine names,
fifteen-year-old whores walk down the planks to the basement,
their smiles seem made of lime, they smell of lime,
in the neighborhood the radio plays darkly for magical dances,
the night comes, hooligans play hooligans.
How difficult
it is to sleep in childhood among the singing chestnut trees....
Disappear into darkness, dissonances! I wanted so much
to be glad
of novelty, tell you about the young street,
but not this one!
Was I deprived of the gift to see, or the gift of
convenient blindness?
All I have is a short note, the poems of a new sorrow.
11.
Speculators took her to a quiet hell
in an isolated villa--she escaped.
She wandered drunk all night,
slept on cement till light.
They threw her out of art school
for lack of socialist morality.
She poisoned herself once--they saved her.
She poisoned herself again--they buried her.
12.
All this is not new. Old is the Cerberus of socialist
morality.
Fourier, the dreamer, charmingly foretold
that lemonade would flow in seas.
Does it flow?
They drink sea water,
crying:
"lemonade!"
returning home secretly
to vomit.
13.
They came and said:
"A Communist does not die"
No man has lived forever.
Only the memory of him is to remain.
The more valuable the man,
the greater the pain.
They came and cried:
"Under socialism
a hurt finger does not hurt."
They hurt their fingers.
They felt the pain.
They began to doubt.
14.
They shouted at the ritualists,
they instructed,
enlightened, and
shamed the ritualists.
They sought the aid of literature,
that five-year-old youngster,
which should be educated
and which should educate.
Is a ritualist an enemy?
A ritualist is not an enemy,
a ritualist must be instructed,
he must be enlightened,
he must be shamed,
he must be convinced.
We must educate.
They have changed people into preachers.
I have heard a wise lecture:
"Without properly distributed economic incentives,
we'll not make technical progress."
These are the words of a Marxist.
This is the knowledge of real laws,
the end of utopia.
There will be no novels about ritualists,
but there will be novels about the troubles of inventors,
about anxieties which move all of us.
This is my naked poem
before it matures
into troubles, colors, and odors of the earth.
15.
There are people tired of work,
there are people from Nowa Huta
who have never been in a theater,
there are Polish apples unobtainable by Polish children,
there are children scorned by criminal doctors,
there are boys forced to lie,
there are girls forced to lie,
there are old wives thrown out of homes by their husbands,
there are exhausted people, suffering from angina pectoris,
there are people who are blackened and spat at,
there are people who are robbed in the streets
by thugs for whom legal definitions are sought,
there are people waiting for papers,
there are people waiting for justice,
there are people who have been waiting for a long time.
On this earth we appeal on behalf of people
who are exhausted from work,
we appeal for locks that fit the door,
for rooms with windows,
for walls which do not rot,
for contempt for papers,
for a holy human time,
for a safe home,
for a simple distinction between words and deeds.
We appeal for this on the earth,
for which we did not gamble with dice,
for which a million people died in battles,
we appeal for bright truth and the corn of freedom,
for a flaming reason,
for a flaming reason,
we appeal daily,
we appeal through our Party.
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Nowadays,
it may seem almost impossible that such a poem should be seen as a
revolutionary departure from Socialist Realism. Yet, in Poland of 1955,
to present the country's social reality in tones even only slightly
different from the official propaganda image of Proletarians' Paradise
marked the end of this new version of formula writing. The shock was
even greater as the first person to publish an anti-SR poem was SR's
prominent theoretician.
Wazyk's method is simple: he limits himself to
a faithful rendering of reality; yet it is this "realist"
approach that was a refreshing change from the embellishments of its
"socialist" variety. |
