POLAND INSPIRES POETRY

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In this edition, poets from the English speaking world inspired by Poland. What aspects of Polish nature, history and modern life do poets from the English speaking world find fascinating? British poet Peter Bateman is inspired by the Lenin monument in the communist industrial town of Nowa Huta, and a cemetery in the town of Siemiatycze in the East. Others are attracted by the hustle and bustle of Warsaw.

When you compare the number of poems written about Poland by foreign writers with the number of poems written about Italy, Greece or France, these countries win by a long shot. And yet, Poland’s turbulent history, its changing borders, as well as the spirit of Polish people whose rebellious nature led to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, are all topics that also attract the attention of poets from the English speaking world.

The year 1989, when Solidarity, Eastern Europe’s first mass anticommunist movement, won the region’s first free elections, remains vivid in the memory of those poets who are interested in Polish history. Peter Bateman is an English poet whose works reflect his fascination with the transition that Poland has gone through. His poem ‘Nowa Huta 1989’ is about a model industrial communist town built in the 1950s right next to the historic city of Krakow. But history played a cruel trick on the communist planners. They deliberately did not build a church in Nowa Huta, even though 95 per cent of the Polish population are Roman Catholics. Deprived of religious services, the people of the model communist town repeatedly staged demonstrations to have a church built there, led by cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who later became Pope John Paul II. Instead of becoming a symbol of communism, with its very prominent monument to the Soviet leader Lenin, Nowa Huta became a symbol of anticommunist struggle.

NOWA HUTA 1989

‘On grey days like today
I imagine Lenin tired of waiting
For the bus or tram that never
Materialised. Tired of standing
Here in a drizzle of acid rain.

I imagine a liberation of pure rain,
A flood, the ark-like church floating
Free, free of drab Nowa Huta,
Imagine the people at Mass praying
For better days than today.’

Polish history inspires poets in more ways than one. English poet Peter Bateman is attracted to the multicultural heritage of eastern Poland, which is home to Poles, ethnic Belarussians and Ukrainians, with strong influences of the vanished culture of East European Jews wiped out during the Holocaust. Poland may be a predominantly Roman Catholic country, but in the East, in towns like Siemiatycze, which lies right on the Belarussian border, you will find just as many Russian orthodox crosses at cemeteries as you will Roman Catholic crosses.

SIEMIATYCZE – THE ORTHODOX CEMETERY

Cyrillic makes these borderlands
Doubly foreign, makes me read
Like a child, with fingers, slowly,
As if picking my way gingerly over
Wet stepping stones, crossing the Bug
As did armies and frontiers before me,
And ideologies too, shackled to their
Misanthropic ballast.

Each headstone is a place, a time.
Here a birth in times where landlords owned
The souls of serfs, dead and alive.
There a death, in peaceful old age,
In the leaden years of terror
Where younger souls were claimed by
Trench coated men of the night who came
In dark saloon cars that were heard
By everyone and no-one.

History’s dark husk cracked open and
Spilled seeds of light to shine on
The domed church on its hill, shine too
On the busy bearded pop, shine on the Catholic
Tolling the Angelus bell, shine on the mound
Of the silent synagogue, on those misanthropy
Denied a grave, illuminate these wounds of God,
Enjoining remembrance, as if to heal them.’

Now for a selection of poems from ‘New Europe Writers Ink’ published in Warsaw in 2006. It’s a collection of writings by a group of ex-pats living in Poland. Polish scenery seems one obvious choice in this collection. This poem by Andrew Fincham depicts one particularly colourful Polish season.

POLISH AUTUMN

‘If there must be
October
Let it come in like a lamb
As Spring did once begin
To welcome leaves
In green from summer’s sun
And flowers
With petals still to shed
As paler shadows lengthen

A gentle end to earth’s year’s labour
Field and garden
Eased towards
A fallow winter’s
A quiet domain

But let October ring
Such colours
That the heart can rise above
Still mists
In glorious red and orange
Singing
With the falling of the leaves
Just quite how much
Is made by us
(and how much more
We owe to thee.)

But in a changing Poland, life is not always as peaceful as that. Another poet, whose works are included in the ‘Warsaw Tales’ collection, is Peter Whiley. Many ex-pats come to Warsaw thinking it’s still as laid-back and unspoilt by modern times as it once was. They find it can be even more fast-paced than the West.

WARSAW MADNESS

The rat race is endless – it never stops
Roads always busy – like 24-hour shops!
It drives me crazy, so am I crazy to drive
In rush-hours lasting from eight till five?

Everywhere you go, road works appear
I drive to Mokotow Galeria in second gear
A 40 minute journey takes two hours,
Longer on Friday – in heavy showers!

Holes lie in wait – to blow your tyres;
Sleepy pedestrians and road hogs stoke the fires
Of ever-present dangers to your life.
OIh why do I put up with such eternal strife?

What are the other options I could take?
Is traveling by train a ‘piece of cake’?
A sardine in a can, crushed so tight,
Head pressed against heaving breasts, left and right.

It’s frightening when faces turn blue,
You become too aware – it could be you!
And if you think a bus would be better – you’d be wrong,
The 517 carries a similar breath-taking throng!

The ‘bus from hell’ does not beat the car.
In one agonizing hour, you don’t travel so far.
The car offers a seat – a veritable plus,
Compared with the inhuman discomfort of a ZTM bus!

So, the car it is – I have no choice;
Only the make – Matiz, Fiat or Rolls Royce.
Noone can go fast – what does it matter?
In Warsaw, speed records I won’t shatter!

Yet ‘Wariaci’ try – you see then everywhere;
Driving where they shouldn’t – they don’t care!
‘Get out of the way’ – that’s their wish,
They are more important – the “Warsaw Big Fish’

I block them, I stop them, I do all I can.
To fight for the sanity of ‘Warsaw Man’.
It’s all such madness, a desperate game,
Will it be forever the same?!’

But not all Poles seem lost in this frantic rush. Jennifer Robertson is our final choice for this edition of Bookworm with her image of a Warsaw courtyard.

WARSAW COURTYARD; WOMAN WITH ROSARY

‘Women sit contentedly in the kindly sun.
This is their final home.
A many-windowed building of honeyed stone
Bounds a secluded yard,
An erstwhile convent, cut off from town.
That busy world is no longer even a distant hum.

The place is graced by a name: Caritas.
The women are the recipients, saggy bundles
In motley hand-me-downs.
No one has much now to call her own.
The charity is in the peace
Of gnarled hands at rest on faded dress.
There is anchorage and quite haven here, giving space
For small things: sulks and pettiness;
And smiles and well-worn reminiscence.

One woman sits apart.
Her sleek brown head does not belong,
It seems to the general throng.
She clutches warm, black beads.
The moorings of her memory have gone
And the rhythms of the rosary, like a childhood song
Comfort her as she drifts, placidly, along.

Sometimes foreigners encroach upon her enclosed space,
Strange beings from some fabled place;
And then she is most anxious to please.
‘Anglais? Francais?’ she enquires, she serenades
Her visitors with ‘La Marseilleise’.
And now we see a book-linen salon,
Glasses of golden tea, and a yung girl brought in
To charm her mother’s guests
With songs she has learnt from her French governess.
The melodies still sing, though words are lost.’

That’s all in this edition of Bookworm, in which we brought you a selection of poems about Poland by writers from English-speaking countries. The poems by Peter Bateman first appeared in British literary magazines. All other poems come from ‘Warsaw Tales’, brought out in the New Europe Writers Ink series published by IBIS.