Two Poems by Maria Jastrzębska

Under Fire

There is way to sleep, even dream
pressed against a stranger’s body
drawing in whatever heat is left.

Close to the ground, if you know
where to look, berries still wait
to be picked, shine blue as stars.

There is a way to run hunched over—
taking a bow in a chorus-line—
through a gap between falling bricks.

Folds of bedding, blades of grass
are singled out too by a first frost.
Eyes, lips, entire faces silvered.

There is a way to stand, catching
your breath, gulping it down as hard
as sucking marrow from a bone.

When it snows, jackdaws will again
lay a trail of prints before anyone else
at a fork in what’s left of the road.

On the 70^th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising

Ola says: Oh politicians, they love a dead hero.
All my life I’d wanted to build a shelter.
See, birch bark and mud plaited through
boughs of pine keep out the wind. I’d lean
my shelter of debris against a dry base
of spruce, save the lower twigs for tinder.
Those whose bodies lie under open sky,
I’d hide them. Wounded, dead, with no one
beside them, in war, in peacetime. But if I ask
Jula and Ola what poems should be about
they say: write about this day and the next,
about quarrelling then running for the bus,
about dropping your ticket, write about birches
if you must, but mostly write about kissing.

Maria Jastrzębska was born in Warsaw and came to the UK as a child. She co-translated Elsewhere, the selected poems of Iztok Osojnik with Ana Jelnikar (Pighog Press 2011). Her translation of an extract of Justyna Bargielska’s Obsoletki (Born Sleeping) was featured in Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive 2016). Her most recent collection is At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013) and her selected poems The Cedars of Walpole Park were translated into Polish by Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Anna Błasiak and Paweł Gawroński (Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetów 2015). A new work, The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue, is forthcoming in 2018.