From the Bug River Area
My great-grandfather played the violin in white gloves
until his hands were hacked off by men searching for gold
and gold watches. Then off the Soviets went beyond the river, to another
time zone. A better fate awaited the violin.
The general’s wife, all star-struck, lost her head for it
and buried it in the garden, so that it would
sprout in the spring, when nude girls
turn into forage fish for large predatory fish. And
the gloves? Ah, the gloves.
* * * * * *
Wind Blowing Through the Holes
My first country, where Hitler stamps are a currency
exchangeable like ivory in the outposts
of white missionaries. Five stamps for a rope
of beads or a round of prayers for every
execution in the family. Mother
remembers standing against the wall, but
she’s alive because he was a good German, so there’ll be
no prayers. From that time, I inherited a helmet full of holes
that’s vintage Nazi and a bayonet. Who could’ve
sensed that as we were saying
goodbye, a rocket barrage
would level half of our city? In the other
a rat is hiding, our silent ally, who
spied on us while we, gazing into each other’s eyes,
made love, and with this picture
in his brain, he’ll live a moment longer.
* * * * * *
Landless Boys
When the bank repossessed his plot outside
the city limits, and his pal, who clumsily played
his guarantor, stopped recognizing him,
we went to the meadow, to splash
in the Pilica River. In my bag I brought a Scholl’s
nail clipper, since it’s come in handy before, ditto
the sub, which we, as if pinned down
by hunger, split and ate right away, though
it wasn’t a hunger in the basic
sense of the word. Reshuffling began on the meadow.
Ants took charge — on our heels, between
our toes, on the straps of two hastily dropped pairs
of sandals. The sun was fulfilling, the finger nails
dug into the ground, and the river, in defiance,
was no longer a border.
* * * * * *
Jerzy Jarniewicz (b. 1958 in Lowicz) is a Polish poet, translator and literary critic, who lectures in English at the University of Lodz. He has published 12 volumes of poetry, 13 critical books on contemporary Irish, British and American literature, and has written extensively for various journals, including Poetry Review, Irish Review, Cambridge Review. His poetry has been translated into many languages and presented in international magazines, including Index on Censorship, Paris Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, and in The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999). He is editor of the literary monthly Literatura na Swiecie (Warsaw) and has translated the work of many novelists and poets including James Joyce, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Edmund White, and Derek Walcott. His most recent works are two anthologies Six Irish Women Poets (2012) and British Women Poets (2015), which he selected and translated. In 1999, he attended International Writers Program in Iowa, in 2006 he was writer-in-residence at Farmleigh, Dublin, and in 2010 he won the Ireland Literature Exchange bursary for literary translators. He has lectured at many universities, including Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, York, Sheffield, Preston, Dublin, Belfast, Prague, Giessen, and Magdeburg.