"She walks into my heart, growing fear like a wild rose shrub."

______

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Ms. Bielobradek

And When I Return To Poland....

And when I return to Poland
It won't be to Warsaw where I stayed before
But I'll live
Under the apple trees with niggardly apples,
Whose leaves wander like Ophelias
Over the walls,
Beneath which Grandma, in a spell, endures.
After I return to Jezewo
To aunt Gena, who is so beautiful with her calloused palms
And cracked heels--I'll be
A girl--a wife--a rosary.

And when I return to Poland--
To my sister and my mother
To the smallest rural window framed by perlargoniums
Mother will unweave my hair, they will shout in the room
The shout will leave the corridor and float out the door
Incomprehensible joy wells within me
While they slide bobby pins in my hair
And lace me in a tightly fitting dress.

Mother is golden in my eyes
I'm afraid to touch her
So withdrawn from men
Slender
A maiden
Who steps upon Mazovian dust
Muddy, gilded
She walks into my heart, growing fear
Like a wild rose shrub.

And when I return to Poland, to Lwow
Where my father's mother has a hiding place for me
Bought by death...

And when I return to Poland--to Jezewo, to Lwow, trees...
To hide in him, in them!

-- Translated by Ralph Bielobradek and Jesse Glass






Lettuce

Allowed herself to be touched everywhere
The rolled-up leaves didn't jump back in fear of palms
Contorted
Deprived of water
Sticky
A hand clung
To her aged flesh
Already lacking crisp furrows
Without crunch
The edges of leaves
While drying
Became greener
Slimmed
A nonelastic surface
Salt settled itself haphazardly
And even negligently,
And the weight of the lettuce changed too.

-- Translated by Ralph Bielobradek and Jesse Glass






Cricket

-- To the memory of my aunt Emily Kawlikowska and her newly born son,
     both killed in Ravensbruch, November 1944.

My name is Cricket
thrown out into the cold,
assaulted by the dogs of cold
I don't recall when my human death occurred.
These hands are becoming winged
these legs will become springs
perishing as they hop
in the sweetness of flowers,
in clouds of flowers.

Still a head
is a human head
but it will soon be hidden
when it achieves a spherical shape,
an insectoid shape,
an impeccable shape.

The time for crickets has not yet come
and so I remain a human larva.
From a clotted belly
A thread congeals
That
which was torn from this hot body
clangs:
Her shout
The frost of her voice
Hair fastened to the wind.

Soon I'll be a cricket and I will sing
when it grows green again
I will sing about my mother, how
They destroyed her human form.

I will write that she was a torn pocket--
An eyelid
From which eyes escaped
Eyes--units of time, human clocks--
And I will sing again in my green world:
"I'm selling glass eyes, my mother's eyes, put them in, give my mother's
eyes to millions of girls."

I don't want to, I don't want to die!

-- Translated by Ralph Bielobradek and Jesse Glass