The moon shines

The moon shines
an empty street
the moon shines
a man flees

the moon shines
a man fell
a man expired
the moon shines

the moon sines
an empty street
a dead man’s face
a pool of water

Abattoirs

Quartered pink ideals
hang in abattoirs

Shops are selling
clowns’
motley death-masks
stripped off the faces
of us who live
who have survived
staring
into the eye-socket of war.
 

Traslated by Adam Czerniawski

Tadeusz Różewicz is Poland’s most popular and influential poet. Born in 1921, he belongs to the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland’s traumatic and tragic war-time experience. ‘What I produced is poetry for the horror-stricken. For those abandoned to butchery. For survivors.’ Rejecting traditional aesthetic values – which struck him as offensive in the face of what he had witnessed – Różewicz has created a stark, direct poetry rooted in common speech, fashioned ’out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words, words from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery.’

Yet Różewicz’s poetry is not confined to recording the horrors of war. They Came to See a Poet includes poems addressing childhood, friendship, love, eroticism, art, the poet’s rôle and obligations, religion, ageing, death and the anxieties of modern civilization. In 2003 Tadeusz Różewicz was awarded the Montale Prize, the latest of many awards and honours.

This third edition includes recent poems and an additional preface by Adam Czerniawski.