Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar (poetry from Poland cycle)

 

Marzanna Bogumila Kielar (pron. Mazhanna Bogoomeelah Kyelar) was born and brought up in a little town in the North-East of Poland. The countryside there is full of lakes and forests and images of this landscape appear in her poetry. She made her début in the “Czas Kultury” magazine in 1992. She teaches philosophy at the university of Warsaw.

FORECAST

Hunting scenes and beggar scenes, love scenes,

war panoramas, grouse courting fields,

racecourses, fashion houses, menageries, machine parks

glowing cities moored in the docks of night

the radiance that is being freed from freezing fumes, tearing itself from the depth

when the ceiling of clouds over the sea lifts slightly and the sky.

with rugged gulfs and straits,

flows around the cumulus clouds –

all this will be consumed by fire.

It won’t even turn into a script of shards and bones.

Waters will evaporate. Froth of clouds and mountains,

alternation of deaths and resurrections, all will flee

and the wild, joyful soul of the world won’t form inclusions

under the sand blown in. In bogs,

river deltas, swamps, asphalt, amber.

Roots, undercut, will die at their posts, pumping life

into full blown buds of days.

And the earth will disappear in the throat of emptiness

like a speckled egg found in a shallow hole in time

lined with grass.

O fire, who knowest everything

what permafrost will be covered by this ash,

this bone-deep blackness.

 * * *

How will you die, O bright day, so attached to yourself, with the sun

between the pine-needles, with this

bright light in the back mirrors of my car

as I am driving into a forest road, with the reddening ball

above the darkened, ploughed-over earth

beyond the ponds, over the furrow sensitive to the touch of feet.

When the wind opens the sky – and there are no footprints

in the treetops. O day –

with a yellowing nettle on a footpath leading down

to the water, with a heedless gnat sitting on my wrist

- will I die? So attached to you

and to the night, to love. The sky like a log stripped of bark

pressed into the turf of hills.

Below it a rugged leaves of sorrel are crowded in a wet bunch.

My gaze clings to the cloud, its greyness – its upturned

burning edge.

HAWK

fabric of water crumpled by cold wind, dark blue, heavy,

torn apart; sudden flutter of wings

far from shore – the lake glitters in sunshine

like a steel blade

blood, materia prima. Combs blindly

the depth that fills it

chokes it

If you would like to read these poems (and some more) on paper, 

You can get a printout of my book "POLISH INSPIRATIONS"