Krystyna Dąbrowska

Two Poems Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Personal Items

The bedding is airing on the balcony.
Not her bedding anymore.
Not her balcony anymore.
Her mother’s finest eiderdowns.
Her mother who’s in a camp.
The whole family is in a camp
apart from her, she can look at her balcony,
not hers any more, in not her home.
Occupied by a German officer.
And his Polish lover.
Who stands before her in the hall
and shakes her head.
“I’ll give you back some personal odds and ends,
but the bedding stays.
Be glad, child, you weren’t in the apartment
when they arrested everyone,
and that I let you come here
and you’re leaving in one piece.”

Mrs F.

We lay in a single room
partitioned by a pastel curtain.

Behind me was a window full of light.
Behind her a corridor full of people.

Sometimes I opened the curtain
and through the old woman’s face
broke the flowers on the nurses’ tunics,
flashes of trolleys delivering the dinner,
and I caught the clatter of clogs,
the clink of plates, the hiss of a coffee machine.

Sometimes she opened the curtain.
My face must have looked like a dark pinhead then,
the garish day fluttering briefly across it.
Mrs F. rose up against her pillows, blinked
and as the daylight faded, closed the curtain.

And as the window by my bed
grew large and black,
I could hear her steady snoring.

I’d open the curtain and watch her sleep
in a white glimmer from the empty corridor
bundled up to her chin in a thin blanket.