Five Poems by Marcia Mitrowski

 

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.