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The Restaurant 'Arcadia," Central Square, Nowa Huta
Secretary General of the All-Russian Communist Party
(the Bolsheviks) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Covered
with snow, the twenty-foot colossus is coming home from work
to his camp barrack. Gaunt, starved. Kept on his feet only
by the convoy guard's goluboy gaze. The frost thrusts its fist at
him
slammed tight like white-hot, humming steppes. The polar
night strips bare. Roll call.
On the stained tablecloths
of Kolyma snow.
"Peter Followed Him from Afar"
Thus You have placed me
in myself that I might know You.
The wall, wire, and dogs look at You
with my eyes.
Hymn
The prison window looks out on a compound.
Snow and clay surrounded
by a concrete wall and barbed wire.
What do you need (O gray eagle)
this tight crown for?
Among Us, the Unclean Ones
They play cards at a table: the old one, skin and bones,
and a young man with a beard. A third
lies in bed and reads a book. Quiet,
a dark window, muffled talk.
From a photograph taped to the wall a young woman
with a little boy on her lap
looks at them. The child, lost in thought, doesn't recognize
his father; he has just lifted his hand (here the picture's
blurred) as if he were blessing
these three prisoners
(the Jews and the Greeks
and the entire earth).
March 1982
"My Sweet Motherland"
I was born in a train,
on a moving frontier,
a Jewish runt in the corner of a freight car,
a Polish-speaking Wehrmacht soldier
marching on Moscow,
an NKVD man of unknown descent
shooting at my ancestors: Poles,
Lithuanians, Tatars - nobles with a two-headed typhus
on their crests.
I was born on their moving graves:
in Kazakhstan, in Lithuania,
in Czestochowa, Kraków, Katyn, London.
This is my citizenship - your belly
raised
beneath your breasts (Annie, little mother).
(My invisible Motherland,
we'll be true to each other.)
It no longer matters.
* * *
You need me? You, the Great
Betrayed One?
I am here in this dirty lowland, in the midst of the shouts
of petty shopkeepers, inept thieves,
and cruel policemen.
With human ashes underfoot, I slapped Your face.
You did not leave me, contempt,
you did not leave me, hatred.
I have achieved you, inhuman language of the future.
Though Mortal, I Desired You
O white fish of November (the city is just now falling asleep).
Ashes of kings, smoke, stone masks of beggars
and informers (now famished time
falls asleep). Only the wind survives, only the wind's
trunk with its bark stripped off;
sing (oh, sing,
my escape).
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh
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