A poem by Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński and translated from Polish by Christopher Patkowski
In the brook of your hair, in the river of lips,
old woods like an evening – dark,
useless crying, doomed splash.
Yet in the dusk I will enfold, with a rose of night,
and the world will pass by with a twig, a shred or a gesture,
and then without a sound will stumble.
A trail will go over the eyes
and I will say – I am.
Yet, in carrying you, reflected in pupils
or on eyelashes hanging like a tear,
I will hear in you chiseled silver by dolphins,
in the shell of your body humming with sleep.
Or in the grove, where you are a birch, with white air
and milk of a day,
a merciless being,
lifting thousand of centuries.
I will stream
with a murmur of a grove of young trees.
In your branches – a bird.
One day – for longing – a century,
one gesture – and already a march of hurricanes,
one step – and you are – a ghost waiting, in ashes.
To my dearest Basia – Krzysztof
II.2. ‘42