Unit 4 Poetry

Zofia Romanowicz (Radom, Poland, 18 October 1922 – Lailly-en-Val, France, 28 March 2010) was arrested by the Nazis in January 1941 and imprisoned for resistance activities. In April 1942 she was deported to Ravensbrück, and in September 1943 she was transferred to Neu-Rohlau. There, while working in a china factory, she wrote the premonitory poem “For My Little Girl . . .” She escaped in the spring of 1945 during an evacuation march and was taken to Rome. In 1946 she settled in Paris. Together with her husband, Kazimierz Romanowicz, they managed the bookstore and publishing house Libella and the Galerie Lambert for nearly fifty years. She wrote eleven novels and numerous short stories and poems. She was awarded the Kościelski Award in 1964 and the Prize of the Polish Ministry of Culture & National Heritage in 2001 for the totality of her work.

The Circle       

Lion fangs, bear claws,
The circle tightens around us
Suffering we wander under
The walls’ vigilant watch. 

The terrible noose tightens,
The dark flood swallows us,
There is no name
For our martyrdom . . . 

Birds captured by a net,
Does caught in the snare,
This is our terrible dance,
This our wild terror. 

Today, as the melting snow
Happily splashes in the gutters,
We are still alive – like
Animals and plants at least.

Animals: when tomorrow
Is filled with suffering,
Listen to the birds’ squealing,
To the hoarse call of the deer. 

Plants: when dawn first brightens
These dark windows,
We will warm our ashen faces
In the reflection.

(Pińczów Prison, 1941)

 
My Biggest Regret

It is not my youth that I shall most regret,
Or Mother, or you – neither the world nor springtime –
But the song that restlessly stirs within me
Waiting to unfurl like a sail.

The hardest part will be to die thinking
That the pain which rends my body
Will also slay the buried Word
Before it blooms on my lips like a flame. 

                                                      Pińczów Prison, February 1942

  
Prepare Me a Dress . . . 

Prepare me a dress, I’m coming back right away;
I left, but I shall return today or tomorrow,
I will want to strip off everything and put on only
What your kind hands give me at the door. 

I shall want to rip everything off me, cast away
Everything that is too heavy, dirty, and bitter –
The dress you give me will smell of green peas
Its folds will wash over my body like water. 

The dress will be blue like flowers by a stream.
It will surround me like a cloud, light and breezy –
Prepare me a dress, darling . . . I am certain
That I shall come back to you . . . very soon . . . 

                                                      Ravensbrück, 1942

 
To My Little Girl

I’ll make a set of dishes for my little girl,
I think it will be lovely;
I’ll mold goblets,
I’ll turn plates,
I’ll paint it with wonders,
Suns, stars, birds –
                  How my little girl will clap her hands! 

But if her little hand thoughtlessly
Bumps something and the set shatters,
Don’t cry, my little one.
Our life too is fragile!
More fragile than these goblets
With their painted stars –
                  Do you know – my heart is full of bloody shards . . . 

                                                      Neu-Rohlau, 1944

*translations by Alice-Catherine Carls and Daniel Simon
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First They Came
by Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me