Joanna Trzeciak

When shadow falls

on my poem

I see light in it

faint stubborn

a life

tiny death

takes its first steps

matures quickly

grows

at night lies

on my heart

on my lips

like a sea chiseled

in black stone

you were screaming at night

dreadfully

frightfully

my wife says

it was death drilling corridors

within me a living being

death screaming within me

like a deserted cave

full of bones

When light falls

on my poem

I see death in it

a black grain

of ergot

in a golden head of wheat

which drifts off

beyond the horizon

September 1983

What sprouts out of the ashes of

Samuel Beckett?

somewhere in this space is

his fading breath

and then a motionless utterance

in the beginning was the word

in the end of the body

What decomposes? What suffers?

meat still full of love

spoils in time

stinks

one has to bury it

Fallen

angels

look like

flakes of soot

abacuses

cabbage leaves

stuffed with black rice

hail

painted red

blue flames

with yellow tongues

fallen angels

look like

ants

moons wedged beneath

the green fingernails of the dead

angels in heaven

look like the inner thighs

of an underage girl

like stars

they shine in shameful places

they are pure like triangles and circles

with silence

inside them

fallen angels

are like the open windows of a morgue

like cows’ eyes

like the skeletons of birds

like falling planes

like flies on the lungs of fallen soldiers

like streaks of autumn rain

connecting lips with birds taking flight

over a woman’s palm

wander

a million angels

devoid of belly buttons

they type on sewing machines

long poems in the shape

of a white sail

their bodies can be grafted

onto the trunk of an olive tree

they sleep on ceilings

falling drop by drop

Where does evil come from?

what do you mean “where”

from a human being

always a human being

and only a human being

a human being is a work-related

accident

of nature

an error

if humankind

disentangles

itself

from flora and fauna

the earth will regain

its beauty and lustre

nature its purity

and innocence

human beings are the only beings

who use words

which can serve as tools of crime

words that lie

wound infect

evil does not come from an absence

or out of nothingness

evil comes from a human being

and only a human being

we differ in thought – as Kant said –

and for that matter in being

from pure Nature