Poland’s shopping center in crooked house,
Showplace of Sopot, fairytale, right Klaus?
A crazy look.
Shop with books.
Where I bought my favorite blue blouse.
Frozen chaos painted the widows
pristine sky blue seen through ice
icicle patterns spirals and swirls
We opened the door and stepped outside
“Jesus it’s cold” your breath the only cloud
Upon the fields of snow
no footprint touched
the freezing glitter on its surface
Sunrise pink, day-glow iridescent
the forest of silver-birch trunks
caught on fire with soft rose light
White, white, crisp cold white
under the pristine sky
and a forest of pink trees flaming in the sunrise
You held your closed fingers to your mouth
breathing on them hoping to warm them
and I could see in your eyes how you scintillated and smiled
We stood there as the chill seeped into ankles
snow deep boots
and the perfect stillness of it all
“Coffee” you said, “I need hot coffee”
We opened the door and stepped inside
Frozen chaos painted the widows
pristine sky blue seen through ice
and the bed sheets still warm from the night
Luella May Poland
1907-1922
The ocean sings my sad refrain.
Sings as the lapsing afternoon
Turns to twinkling twililight.
It sings the polyphonic notes and harmonies
Of a life at once wondrous and magical
And then tragic.
The soft but harsh music of ebb and flow
Of loving, living and then, simply dying.
It sings masterfully the pleasing chords
Of desire and curiosity and fantasy.
It sings the distant aloof music
Of forgotten memories in the gloaming sundown,
Of lost minutes in the stunning shadows,
With the only boy I ever kissed,
The only boy whose trembling touch I allowed
Upon the small of my back,
There in the caressing shade of infinite arousal
There in the absconding darkness of thrilling intimacy!
Indeed, the ocean sings my sad refrain.
It sings now and forever.
It sings the soft music of the stars.
The magical wondrous harmonies
Of ebb and flow,
Of wind and time and space.
It is finished.
Snow falls on the brittle leaves of birch trees,
their branches miraculously overlooked by the December wind.
It makes a sound like the marching feet of scary Germans rushing through Poland.
Snow, mixed with freezing rain,
falls hard on the roof of an unheated barracks in Auschwitz,
filled with men and boys in pajamas.
It sounds not unlike the far-off thunder of the radio in the commandant’ s house,
the angry voice of the Fuhrer.
Snow, descending from the sky like shaved ice, on a brittle day,
5 maybe 8 degrees.
It covers the makeshift roadblocks in the streets of Warsaw,
making little mountains — so pure on the outside but fetid, rotten, corrupt beneath the fine powder.
This snow,
this ice falling to the ground,
sounds like Russian boots jumping over the mountains.
Rain in Gdansk,
a fine mist,
the smell of the sea.
It covers the streets, where men whisper things that will someday be heard
and old women fall on their knees to pray the Rosary.
This rain,
it smells of freedom.
' Me & my pal Ginsberg arrive in Poland, now more artisticly able from coffee-blood and sleep deprivation. I hear him say: "If you can speak your heart, speak, but make sure you do it with style; give each word a signature" '
We descend,
the head pressure...
two weeks, two fingers pushing
into the lobe, bent back eyebrows,
head slicked fishlike, tongue numbed,
unable to unfurl, or save brain from
aneurism, burst bloodvessles
over unknown enemy land,
somewhere over graves, cossack soldiers,
dead over stolen hillfronts, battalions,
old anger unsettled on greenhills, wheat fields,
clouds now eye level.
Landed.
An Indonesian flag is a Polish flag upside down.
The capital of Jakarta is a long way from Warsaw town.
On the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo,
sauerkraut and kielbasa is something they don’t know.
Has the average Indonesian ever heard of Thaddeus Kosciusko?
Does anybody know a good Indonesian joke?
People tell Polish jokes until they choke.
There is little to compare between these two countries.
Poland and Indonesia bear very few similarities.
camped out behind
the baltic sea
the making of me
washes up apon
blood soaked stones
of cunning tides
behind the vacant
graves apon our
burial ground
silence abode
all movement
abroad