My gaze embraced the world of child
Wydawnictwo Wriart,
Publikacja okolicznościowa z okazji Roku Janusza Korczaka dla
Stałego Przedstawicielstwa RP przy Biurze ONZ w Genewie
Ilustracje i opracowanie graficzne Joanna Hrk
Wydanie czterojęzyczne, albumowe,
Warszawa 2012
Wybrane wiersze
The Old Doctor`s Children
YOU were sentenced to holocaust.
Instead of saving the CHILDREN from dying,
You taught them to pass fearless and dignified, DOCTOR.
They were going in fours into FATE.
In worn-out shoes.
In shabby clothes.
Each with its favourite toy.
The orphaned CHILDREN, that`s it.
One boy carried a flag.
The other played the violin.
You were with the children for ever, as usual.
With heart given to each of THEM.
You kept going and nobody stood in the way.
The soaring steps echoed in heavens.
On earth like frocks the shadows trailed.
The world of my childish peers
It was no fairy tale cottage of cake,
with sugary gates,
but a barrack…,
fenced with a barbed wire,
around it, all daisies were stamped,
a bird`s note was drowned.
Only the oven of the old witch
was brought from a tale,
with a wide grate,
there, with waning sparks, fell
a burning torch of a child`s life.
I bow my pen …
I bow my pen-
a poets` forehead,
before
the CHILDREN of inhuman times,
whose steps declined
through snows and forests of Siberian grounds.
I bow my pen-
a poets` forehead,
before the children whose eaglet spirits flew
into the distance,
who fell dead in shot clean helmets
like stones flung into earthwork.
I bow my pen-
a poets` forehead,
before the CHILDREN and their pupils of despair,
imprisoned in barbed wire
between the walls of cry and death.
I bow my pen-
a poets` forehead,
before the CHILDREN in the minefields,
with pendants of grenades
and trotyl in their backpacks…
Before the CHILDREN mourned by the world.
Before the CHILDREN cried over by mothers, and nobody else.
An iron bird
It was shot down before my eyes.
Burning inside of its own flames.
I saw its descent.
But it soon would arise.
Circling in the sky.
Eclipsing the sun.
In its claws - white feathers and blood
on the bow, -
that is your dove of peace… Picasso.
Monuments
I put red and white roses
at many a monument.
At many of them I kneeled down
in a puddle of tears.
But only at a tiny one, where
into angel a granite stone
turned,
a white sheet burnt.
On it instead of a lullaby
I wrote a lament.
Bird`s Niobe
A bird flew from over the sky-
in its beak a flapping fly.
The bird flew into the nest
that a fox had ripped into shreds.
The bird went dumb at the sight.
The empty nest made it petrified.
So much pain and torment dwelled in
the small bird.
Tears surged into a river
within seconds, and all that turned into
sand spilling from within its tiny eyelids.
Childhood
Open- like holding a book of fables
with bright colours.
Legible- like capital letters before your eyes.
It is a fleeting butterfly which skimmed with its wing
the rim of a rose petal of poetry,
unaware of life as grey
prose in hard cover.
A child`s world
My gaze embraced the world of child,
which, from afar, looked like
a coloured ball.
And set against it, the world of adults
stood like an old windmill,
instead of grinding,
it kept on rattling about flour.
And a poet fighting with windmills with his pen as a sword,
reminded of a wandering Don Quixote.
A night heron`s distribution
The children on earth
are given food from
a purblind cook.
Hence the ladle`s uneven.
Hence a night heron`s distribution:
One child is surfeited ,and the other
asks for scrap.
No need for a dish-washer with
such eating. The hungriest will
lick the plates clean and scrape
the pot`s bottom leaving sheen.
The children of the sun
Skeletons wrapped up in a black skin-
Ribs clearly seen.
What brims with life
are the black mirrors of their eyes.
The bulging bellies
like tribal drums.
They beat the rhythm
with tibiae of their arms.
The sounds of hunger.
Only sometimes the music is disrupted
with Red Cross signals. A lorry with
bread, water and rice…
To prolong the hunger`s pangs.
Thus before our eyes day by day
African children wilt away.
Those black roses
in the world`s bouquet.
A substitute topic
They discussed heatedly,
at an international conference,
the issues of the children of the Third World:
-
Every 5 second a child dies of hunger.
Undertakers can`t manage to dig up graves.
Statistics are blatant… .
The next day,
this issue in the world`s press
was clamoured out by a stain that
a journalist on one of the participant`s
white collar discerned.
A nobody`s child
I know you have a mother elsewhere,
But her image in your mind is blurred.
Her heart is like a station lounge so bleak,
where in a small and chilly corner you can sit.
And I know you have a father.
Fatherless though you`ve become.
Now in seventh heaven, now completely down-
he is wild. So you cannot linger by his side.
Cry out, poet: THIS IS OUR CHILD!
It lives here, we are on its side.
Yet, there are the lonely ones,
hosts of them. Help a no-one`s child.
Little grandson,
see the poor child in a tunnel,
bring it light, reach out your hand,
be a brother to it in its lonely land.
Encounter on the road
I walked past a girl,
looking familiar,
No words for good morning.
No words for goodbye.
When I looked back,
bewitched by her tress,
she also looked back…
Thus our eyes met.
- Where have you been, mother?
- Daughter, this voice I recognise.
- You were a dark stain in my eyes…
- Where have I been? – you just asked.
I `ve been looking at the blue clouds.
You were looking down…on earth, like an orphan does.
So our eyes rarely met,
Though so close we were by our sides.
In a Foster House
Looking through the window,
he found a birch, and somehow his sorrow left.
Though it was grey
and leaning,
for him, only the birch had a heart.
It doesn`t master,it was made of bark.
A little beggar
With a white cane and dark glasses,
a boy was standing at a shop,
rattling his soundless
money-box.
- Faking a beggar, you little rogue!
Your mum`s wallet is not that small –
A security guy cried, and twisting the boy`s ear,
told him to disappear.
- Where is your mum?- I asked
-He said she cleaned the house!
and clenched a stick painted white.
When he took off the glasses-
my eyes were stunned
by the blue flash of his eyes…of glass.
Busy working parents
He wakes up – his parents already at work.
He falls asleep – the parents still working.
On the table some money is left.
Only on Sundays it stikes their minds
they have a son.
Their eyes are really surprised.
How come he`s grown so fast.
And they ask,
Is he in the fourth or the third class.?
To the grandson
Don`t roll your hands like that,
pointlessly, don`t, grandson.
To all people open them wide up,
as giving is a great art.
Take my word for it,
Everything you have in your hands,
the staff of your fingers
into notes of
a joyful song will array.
A red heart`s badge
Son, you don`t have to wear
this heart on your forehead
to show off
you threw a penny into a box.
Everyone looks the same with a badge.
When you`re at home, after the collection`s done
place it in an album, someday you`ll count
the times a sick child, for your help, -
reached his hand out.
A picture exhibition
At an exhibition called: MY DREAM HOUSE –
Everybody, whoever,
could hang up their pictures.
So they poured in thousands.
But there was only one masterpiece
for the public.
It was a made-of- brick HEART,
upon a grey paper,
put in palette.
With an inscription in down corner:
House for the CHILDREN, the homeless.
A little robot
A friend`s parents – electronics specialists,
sometimes joke
that his son is a robot in a child` body.
He is a top student.
Doing the program encoded in his brain.
No mind-twisting task is an obstacle for him.
Nothing jars in his perfect mechanism..
Yet…
By night he takes a box out of a drawer
and…puts up a house with building blocks,
or reads himself a goodnight fairy tale.
A truant
In a station waiting-room
a boy was sitting still
like stone, and reading
a book
upside down.
- Who are you waiting for? – I asked.
-For a mate! – he replied
and pierced me with his
dark-blue inky eyes.
But please pretend that you`re my mum,
if you see an officer coming by.
A run-over dog
There was a grate of brakes around,
a screech of tyres, a screaming child.
And rose above a smell of rubber.
Sombody`s briefcase on the ground…
- A dog dashed in the street!
- Surely on holiday is his master!
- He headlong ran with red lights on!
- With passers-by he should`ve crossed.
Right there he lay run-over-
before a hit car on the road.
A flashing searchlight were his eyes.
Like stubblefield his hair raised up.
- A stuck-in-the-mud, move back!
-Try helping with your tail!
One looker threw a core.
The hooters urged him on…
And then a child ran up to it,
with frightened eyes…
with broken leash –
and kneeled before a lying dog.
A Mother`s Day bunch of wishes
How I`d love to see you ,mother.
Meet you one more time in life.
But I know you won`t come down
the stairs to me.
Much as I hate the room in the attic,
I went up there on Mother`s Day
with a bunch of wishes, when on the threshold,
you smiled brightly from the photo frame
at me.
In the room of your-not-there, I felt
happy and relieved. No more suffering
in the chest. And the walls that so much
medicine got imbibed, now began to smell with
flowers from my card.
Looking for parents
-LOOKING FOR PARENTS!- the billboards glare.
Under the glaring cry – A CHILD.
Like anyone.
Only the tears twice as large as shooting stars
suffused its eyes.
As I hear the cry,
as I look at that CHILD,
a huge ink-tear`s dropping down,
and…..in thin and flimsy letter- rivulets
there pours my pain and splashes on the page.
The unwinged
How many more of them,
like Johnny the fiddler,
were left unwinged
He had his music plucked off
and a violin wrenched
by time`s wind.
And how many of them like
Anthony couldn`t fly high with carving
because a gale blew harsh not in the windmills
but straight in their eyes.
How many Pegasus` foals
couldn`t neigh in the nebulous fields
because they had their wings slashed,
and their feathers plucked for quilts.
How many more of them…
Many… up there on Parnassus
there is a garden of genuine talent
beings, watered with tears of Muses
and no longer scourged by the wind.
A stepmotherly world
When Mars, fiery-eyed,
enters his arsenal,
the world looks at him aside.
It doesn`t see the children of war-
instead of books in their hands,
they are holding hand grenades.
The world wouldn`t see the tears and the pain,
the children in snowstorms
and in lethal flames.
And they couldn`t stop the tears from falling
for they only had their handkerchiefs
as dams.
Heavens hemisphere overheads,
like umbrellas,
kept
the children safe.
Johnny`s dream
Johnny`s parents work hard and long hours,
Monday, Friday, even Sunday.
They work hard for the money
to buy him things they lacked
in their childhood.
Good food, lunch at school,
Quality clothes and shoes.
A latest mobile,
and obviously the newest computer.
When they thought their son had it all,
he cried out: It`s a teddybear I want!
A teddy, he whispered softly,
So that I have someone to talk to,
and cuddle to when I want to.
A band
I wanted to embrace Mother Earth
but she was too big in the waist.
I called out: People, help!
Let`s clasp our hands like rainbow bands.
We`ll make it together,
Disillusion came.
The black, the yellow, the white
unwillingly kept their hands together tight.
The colour of skin was the hindrance,
and made a huge wall rise.
But when the grown-ups left,
all children came on running
from every quarter and every part.
And put their hearts together,
as all the hearts are equal in colour.
A Row
The nerves are being frayed.
The tongues are slashing themselves.
One fist threatens another-
I`ll beat you, beware!
When anger knocked it about,
the reason awakened at last.
And stamping its foot, it called out:
Enough of the row! Let`s talk
ike good pals.
Hear the heart in the breast cage,
it`s tousled. It`s thumping like mad
and quaking all feared and sad?
A ladybird
- If, by mistake, you step on a ladybird-
granny is warning me,
Don`t say it`s such a NOTHING,
neither having tears in the pupils,
nor blood in the veins;
with such a faint sparkle of life.
Lean over a ladybird and cry,
so that your heart is not petrified.
What would Earth be?
- What would earth be without the SUN,
without the shine of children`s eyes:
a dead planet lump,
by polar night?
- What would earth be without the SUN,
without the warmth of a child`s smile:
a snowball.
And you, an icicle
under a cosmic thatch,
MAN?
- Perhaps an earth would be a grain of sand
under a child`s eyelid retained.
Words of a child
Words of a CHILD,
they are the foals of Pegasus.
There`s so much lightness in their wings.
So many twinkling sparks under the hoofs.
And in the strands of tails such real music,
that you could only pleat
poems like tresses from manes.
To a child
You are my SUN.
The brightest star in space.
I am - a planet,
without shiness,
revolving around its axis.
But when I track down the orbit around you,
I light up a WORD in darkness
with a light that`s from you rebounced.