December
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- December*
December, herald of destruction, takes you on a long stroll through the black torsos of trees and leaves scorched in autumn’s fire,
as if to say: so much then for your secrets and your treasures, the fervent trill of small birds, the promises of summer months.
Your dreams have been dissected, the blackbird’s song now has a rationale, plants’ corpses clutter the herbarium. Only the laboratory’s hard stone remains.
Don’t listen: they may take everything away, but they can’t have your ignorance, they can’t take your mysteries, strip you of your third homeland.
Don’t listen: the holidays draw near and frozen January, snow’s white paper. What you’ve waited for is being born. The one you’re seeking will begin to sing.
—translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh [End Page 6]
Adam Zagajewski, a native of Poland, is the author of a number of books of poetry, some of which have been translated into English—Mysticism for Beginners, Tremor, Canvas, Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Eternal Enemies: Poems (2008). He is also author of Solitude and Solidarity, Two Cities: On Exile History and the Imagination, and Another Beauty—all prose, the later being a memoir. Before joining the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Footnotes
* Reprinted with permission from Samizdat Issue #1, Autumn 1998 ( http://www.samizdateditions.com/issue1/ ).
