While Reading Szymborska’s
“Monologue of a Dog” with My Cat
I’m reading Wislawa Szymborska,
poet of my immigrant grandparents’
homeland, fishing out words like carrots,
marchew, onion or cebula, chicken soup
ingredients I might easily recognize
from childhood. My Saturday Morning
Polish classes resonate where z and y
together for an eight year old became
a mythological creature leaping above
our heads, our tongues tapping teeth,
tickling our palates. I still see a primer,
my elementarz, ethnic happy children
under a willow tree, sweet language
a confection swirling around them.
I wish, Wislawa, your rich images
in translation could teach me
to remember my paternal relatives
singing songs as my older sister
squeezed that pretty accordion
Sunday afternoons, her fingers
running up the shaking keyboard
as if polkas could raise the dead
and American streets were paved
in gold ready to be claimed Monday
right after chicory root coffee
and hot kasza z mlekiem.
The Blue Truth
All those lessons about water
and its blueness, the colour
blind taught them I learned
over time. Most tap water
a conspiracy of chemicals,
usually poured clear as glass
except in Beijing or Shanghai.
Flying hours above the Pacific,
how grey her expansiveness,
no aquamarine or turquoise
from the jumbo jet, suspended
in a sky where day and night wed.
Later I knew a the Caribbean ’s blue
curaçao lapping around islands
in its most other worldly hue.
Swimming in it I morphed
into a Monet or Van Gogh
portrait, hair a bit cerulean,
my skin picking up a light
Prussian blue, and my soul
secretly transcendent
in its cobalt blue bikini.
Hold On
Wherever you go, she tapped
her chest with a rounded fist
of fleshy fingers - I almost heard
her heart respond - carry me
right there among the others
still born into your life's rhythm,
we don't leave, just relocate
how easy, without a home
or baggage, we're the air
between falling leaves,
the salty tear last to roll
back into the sea,
and moonlight singing
behind clouds.
Whose Time
How do I summon the courage
to retire, giving up a routine
which the body memorized
yet I perform mindfully, a monk
rejoicing in morning then falling
gracefully asleep after rich hours
spilled themselves about me
with students' lives in hundreds
surrounding my simple table,
breaking my bread, I their nan or roti,
toasting cultural holidays I couldn't
pronounce, their exquisite children
my grandchildren but without
my family's handmedown names,
high foreheads, those blue eyes,
that curly hair, or musical talent.
If I push back the chair, sweep the crumbs,
will I remember hello in Arabic, a Swahili
goodbye, or how are you in Somali?
And who will say, je t'aime, one more time.
Peace Bridge
Above the Niagara River with her current
dancing in a perpetual pow-wow, traffic flows
from the US to Canada and back,
a perpendicular
line of steel beams crisscrossing, their shadows
falling in logical order like sentences spanning
the expanse. The click of the concrete sections
echoes in rattles, a counterpoint to the whirring
thruway just west aside the Niagara, "Onguiahhra,"
as the Algonquins called it, a long neck connecting
Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. At dusk how the sun, a bright
orb, drops silently behind the bridge, traffic moves
across her orange skin in a rhythmic breeze, a tattoo
of trucks without a mark. Nomads on wheels traverse
a hundred year old structure leaving no footprints,
freely leaving one country and entering another
while revealing their names and a simple destination.
Marcia Mitrowski teaches English as a Second Language to refugees and
immigrants. She takes nature walks, gardens, and photographs the ordinary. She
also gives tours as a docent at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
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