Poetry by Krystyna Lenkowska

By Krystyna Lenkowska

A Man Wearing a Cap

A man wearing a cap
 slowly killed a goose.
 He held it between
 his legs as if it were
 a tongue-lashed
 child or a woman
 who’d drunk
 hemlock and then
 been forced to vomit.
 

A cat sensually
 watched
 the ritual.
 Nearby people
 busy with life
 were passing.
 

Only the sound of the forest
 and my heart
 could be heard.
 The silence of that picture
 hit me
 in the face.
 

Oh, well.
 The millennium goose, the cat, and us.
 All cannon
 fodder.
 

The Fifth One
 

Every moment I kill one tender thought as if it were a persistent fly.
 But it wants only to live.
 

I imagined love like a gigantic fruit fly.
 

I wonder who would then be the first to die the unnatural death:
 I, it, or this fruit of paradise.
 
Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough

Love
 

It gets up first and bustles in my head
 arranges images and the sequence of emotions
 steps aside
 tries to walk softly as if it’s never existed.
 

I don’t touch it mornings
 that’s our agreement and I wait
 for it to wash away in the monotony of memory
 in the disloyalty of time.
 I wait so at last I won’t have to wait
 all day long.
 

Evening comes and what’s next my dear Lao Tzu?
 Here I stutter and confound the audience
 those squinting eyes of a chinese cat.
 Always at the same place in the dusk
 I cross over to the other side of the word beyond the image.
 The idea of self-eclipse doesn’t exist there.
 There’s an entry into light one period of time
 and love’s trusting unhumiliated face
 at the level of our eyes and lips.
 
Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough

Snow

                Ryszard Kapuściński died today
 

You are falling as many of us fall under gravity’s weight
 You are flying
 From where we all come.
 

You are leaning against time and earth
 Deer marks trace after you
 A dog falls inside you with such an obviousness
 In its eyes that it makes my flesh creep.
 

In Subcarpathian Słocina you are the same
 As in Turkish Kars
 A legend of Herodots.
 

Love, death and trash are under you
 Lightly stamped.
 

You are geometry on glass
 A glass on the road.
 They crush our fragile bodies
 In your majesty.
 

Pieces of rockets from Baykonur fall on your head for us
 But you are lying on your back in the Altai Mountains
 An untouchable equilibrist

Oh, my white idealist.

Translated by: Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, Janusz Zalewski and John Guzlowski