Why

Why do you ask me to write to you?
Why do you ask me
To go naked before you
Like a paleolithic?
Writing is the one thing that leaves me naked.
When I speak
I keep somewhat clad.
When I write
I roam light,
Free as a legendary bird.
When I write
I divorce myself from history
And from earth's gravity
To orbit in the outer space of your eyes.

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

We Won’t Look Truth in the Eye

Truth has no eyes
no face
no tongue

truth is wingless
it doesn’t live
beyond the seven seas hills forests

I think that truth
is more like a nagging growth
that gnaws inside

I think it’s
that sticky thing
rolled into a ball somewhere under your skin
it hates comfort
it suddenly swells
and sends out desperate signals
dark ones like a deaf-mute’s moving hands

it hurts
it chokes
you can’t keep quiet any longer

you scream

---Urszula Koziol
(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh;

The Dream

I had the dream where you read your own poems,
Like those written sometime ago,
only these were in the grey book
written after death…

And you look finer, paler and tinier every passing moment,
Then you disappeare.

The last to vanish were your hands
And only the poems were left unharmed
And in the poems was left
someone’s heart.

--- Grazyna Chrostowska


(Translated by Jarek Gajewski)