Shadow
Translated by Mira Rosenthal
To you, I leave the places where I’m absent.
That one along the Oder, another at the Reservoir,
apart from those some beds and attics, a mattress.
Especially the mattress. It’ll be much easier
to think of you as filling them, growing and going
rampant in places vacated and those that still remain,
to say it plain—everywhere else. From the shadows
perhaps you’re watching me pass through the gate
and snap, I’m gone, no longer. I bequeath to you
what falls apart, burns down, what shifts in shape,
what changes its own state, what’s been consumed
in the grave by a fat worm and is already clay
and grass and wood and chamomile. Please live there
and use it how you want, climb into my clothes and put
yourself in my shoes, set up a table, drink with the neighbors.
It’s my word, these letters against you and your minutes.
Translated from the Polish
Notes:
Read the Polish-language original, “Cień,” and the translator’s note by Mira Rosenthal.
Source:
Poetry
(September 2023)
