Leslaw Nowara was born in Gliwice (Poland). He is a lawyer by education, a graduate of the Silesian University in Katowice. He is a poet, aphorist, columnist and literary reviewer who made his debut in the literary press in 1983. He has published ten volumes of poetry: Green Love, House of Green Windows, The Third Eye, Russian Roulette, Cocoon, Quietdark, Dot and Line, The Dark Side of Light (selected poems), The Whale’s Bone; The flood is yet to come; and four volumes of literary miniatures (aphorisms and epigrams): The World According to Ludek, The Big Little Ludek, Sentences with a Dot, and Ludek the Fatalist. He writes his works in Polish and publishes them regularly in the most important literary periodicals in Poland, but in translations into other languages they have also been published in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia (in his own English translations), as well as in Ukraine, Romania, Czechia and Slovakia. A member of the Polish Writers’ Association, he lives in Gliwice (Poland).

Infectious city

My hometown is infectious, and I am sick with my hometown, infected
by my childhood memories, carried in my saliva and blood.
I am spreading this hometown of mine to foreign cities like plague and syphilis,
and my childhood memories are trailing after me, like flocks of rats, like clouds of flies,
like packs of stray cats and dogs.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Tarnobrzeg, Walbrzych or Krosno,
whether it’s Madrid, Vienna or Rome.
I know exactly on which bench in Paris I will find the same letters carved
with a knuckle in the park, I remember well that tenement in Bytom with its oak door
and loosened handle, I remember that shoe store in Munich
with its yellow neon sign flashing after dark, and after all, that arbor in the courtyard in Verona,
looks the same as in Zabrze, and exactly the same are the sandboxes
and swings in the playgrounds of Berlin, Opole and Jaslo.
Nothing has changed in fifty years. The tap water in every hotel has the same taste of water
drawn straight from a well and scooped by hand straight from a bucket, as it did fifty years ago
in Podlasie, on a rural farm at my aunt’s house.
So is it why I pay for these hotels, buses and streetcars, why I pay for cabs, cabs and rickshaws,
so that when I walk ahead, I can find my own footprints left as a child in the park alleys,
the imprints of my own shoes in the mud and snow?
Each of these foreign cities lures you with smiling women on billboards, bodies of models
and hostesses on travel agency flyers, and then draws you into castles, palaces, museums
and churches like brothels and sells you dearly, and yet, in the end anyway,
you leave each of them with relief and throw them out of your mind like a cheap whore.

Sorry for the old gods

I feel a little sorry for the old gods
abandoned by people
and robbed of their faith

those roadside Christs
struggling to hold on to their crosses
on rusty nails

those Madonnas
amidst meadows and fields
wilting in shrines
like flowers placed in jars

I feel sorry for those Greek and Roman gods
whose fates are difficult to distinguish today
from the adventures of Superman and Batman
and even Bolek and Lolek and Mickey Mouse

who would have thought that the mighty Hephaestus
would be defeated by a box of matches
and the almighty Zeus
by a fire extinguisher and a lightning rod

the great rivers Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile
overflow their banks once a year
without the need to pray to them

no god today has the power
to eclipse the sun
or capture a comet or a shooting star

and yet I believe

I believe in the summer rain, after which the grass turns green
I believe in the sun that turns wheat and rye golden
I believe in ripe chestnuts, apples, acorns, and pears falling to the ground
I believe in butterflies hatching from cocoons and chicks hatching from eggs

and that is all the faith I have
as much as I
myself
have enough for it

Heart of Darkness

*
Last Monday, the body of an unidentified young woman
was recovered from the Gliwice Canal lock.
The woman was wearing a denim dress and was barefoot.
Both hands were clenched tightly
around a wooden board, probably
part of the deck of a barge or boat,
but so far there is no information
about their possible sinking.

*
Chrobry Park is a safe place.

Young women pushing baby carriages stroll along the alleys,
teenagers ride bicycles, scooters, and rollerblades,
elderly ladies and gentlemen walk their dogs,
and the squeals of children can be heard on the playground.
The swings and carousels creak metallically,
and from a distance you can hear the calm flow of the Kłodnica River
and the usual squawking of seagulls and terns by the river.

In Chrobry Park, which is a safe place,
on a hot Saturday afternoon,
a girl in a denim dress
sat down on a wooden bench,
took off her sunglasses
and took a rather thick book out of her purse.
“Lord Jim” was the title of the book,
and on the pages she was reading,
a piercing wind was blowing,
torrential rain was pouring down,
stormy waves were crashing onto the deck
and a ship called the Patna was beginning to sink.

And although it hadn’t rained in Chrobry Park for several days,
a single drop fell from a single leaf on a chestnut tree
whose branches reached over the park bench,
and splashed onto the book,
so unexpectedly that the book fell from the girl’s hands
and spilled onto the ground.
so unexpectedly that the book fell out of the girl’s hands
and spilled into a large puddle at her feet.

This puddle was like a bottomless well,
with only a rim spinning around its axis,
like a wheel torn from a carriage,
like hula hoops spinning around the hips.
In an instant, the puddle sucked all the water from the clouds
and pinned the girl to the bench with sharp, spiky streams of rain.

She tried to scream,
but her mouth was filled with air as thick as sea water,
which was cold and salty and smelled of fish,
and a wind so violent arose that the trees around the bench
began to break like masts,
the wind so cold that the leaves turned white and fell to the ground, torn like sails.

Although the girl clung to the bench with both hands,
the streams of rain threw themselves at her like a fishing net,
entangled her and tightened their knots
and dragged her to the very edge of the nearby Kłodnica River,
where from the tarry abyss, water sprites and water spirits
were already reaching out their tentacles and hands for her.

A brief discussion of what the lack is

The lack is precisely that empty space
left by a chair
that has been moved far away from the table

because the lack of a chair
has the same right to exist
as a chair
and exists just as realistically
the lack of a chair does not deprive anyone
of the opportunity not to sit down
it does not take away the lack of support from anyone’s back
and someone who is not there
on the lack of a chair
may not even sit down comfortably

after all, no one else
but the lack
occupies empty seats in the theater
empty seats on buses and trams
it is the it that sits on empty benches in the park

it was the lack that was in your place before you took it
so it will take it again as soon as you leave
with your cigarette in your hand
with your unfinished book
and your half-drunk coffee

Her whole life

Hania,
who died yesterday
in the hospital,
was fourteen years old.

“My daughter, you have your whole life ahead of you,”
her mother told her
just a few days before her death

And it was true

She didn’t say, after all,
whether that whole life
was sixty-three years
or three months
or maybe less than three days

Red Sea

The Red Sea
is black

Just as black
as the Yellow Sea and the White Sea
and even blacker
than the Black Sea

On the black Red Sea
sailboat
like the fin of a white shark
or like a tern
with its beak cuts through the water
to the white bone
and the dead water
sinks to the seabed

On the seabed
blood can be seen
mounds of graves
and black bones

On the seabed
you can still see
fortified castles
of sand

It is only at the seabed
can be clearly seen
that this bottom
is the roof
covered with sand
under which
is the house
in which
light is burning
smoke is rising
you can feel the smell from the kitchen
you hear distinct footsteps
on the stairs