Poet of the Month 093: HALINA POSWIATOWSKA

 

 

HALINA POSWIATOWSKA, c 1955

 

 

 

 

I LIKE LONGING

 

 

I like longing

climbing up the railings of sound and colour

catching into my open mouth

the frozen scent

 

I like my loneliness

suspended higher

than a bridge

embracing the sky with its arms

 

and my love 

walking barefoot 

over the snow

 

 

 

Dzien dzisiejszy

[Present Day]

1963

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I LACK FORMER TENDERNESS

 

 

I lack former tenderness for my body

yet I tolerate it like a beast of burden

useful though it requires much care

it brings pain and joy and pain and joy

sometimes inert from pleasure

sometimes shelter for sleep

 

I know its twisted hallways

can tell which way exhaustion comes

which tendons laughter tenses

and I remember the unique taste of tears

so like the taste of blood

 

my thoughts — a flock of frightened birds

feed on the field of my body

I lack my former tenderness towards it

yet feel more acutely than before

that I reach no further than my outstretched arms

and no higher than I can rise on the tips of my toes
 

 

Oda do rak

[Ode To Hands, 1966]

 

 

 

 

Both poems translated by

MAYA PERETZ

 

 

 

 

 

Halina Poswiatowska (née Myga) was born in the southern Polish city of Czestochowa on 9 May 1935.  During the 1945 liberation of the city from Nazi occupation she and her parents were forced to seek shelter in a damp freezing basement for a prolonged period of time, leading her to develop the chronic heart condition that would prematurely end her life on 11 October 1967 at the age of thirty-two. 

 

Obliged to spend much of her childhood in hospitals and sanitoriums, she developed an early interest in writing and poetry.  In 1954, against the cautionary advice of her doctors, she married her fellow hospital patient, the artist and apprentice filmmaker Adolf Rzszyard Poswiatowska.  The marriage lasted two years, ending with her husband's death in 1956.

 

Two years later the young widow traveled to the United States to undergo heart surgery, a journey largely funded by donations received from sympathetic Polish-Americans.  1958 also saw her publish Hymn balwochwalzy [Idol Worship], her debut volume of poetry.  This was followed by two more collections — Dzien dzisiejszy [Present Day, 1963] and Oda do rak [Ode to Hands, 1966] — and her final collection Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie [One More Memory] which appeared posthumously in 1968. 

 

Rather than return to Poland after undergoing her dangerous but life prolonging operation, Poswiatowska chose to remain in the United States, living a hand to mouth existence while she applied for a scholarship to study philosophy at Smith College in Massachussetts.  (She did this despite having no fluency in English at that time.)  She graduated from Smith in 1961 and, after refusing an offer to continue her studies at Stanford University in California, returned to her homeland where she enrolled as a philosophy student at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.  She was working on her doctorate, a study of the ethical principles of black civil rights activist Martin Luther King, when she died eight days after undergoing a second major heart operation which she had hoped would improve her rapidly deteriorating health.

Never a mainstream poet, Poswiatowska's work gained little recognition during her lifetime, only coming to be fully appreciated after her death — a reappraisal that has continued in subsequent decades and now sees her regarded as one of Poland's leading modern poets.

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems (in English) by Polish poet HALINA POSWIATOWSKA:

 

https://allpoetry.com/Halina-Poswiatowska

 

 

 

 

 

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