April like a lovely flame this year
wants to save us with forsythia prayers
and plucks the heavens as lightly as strings.
To our wounds it presses tiny leaves.
This is the body's season, fragile, unholy,
trembling before each crush of air,
each ghost that capers in the distance.
Spring is killing us—
it kisses us on the lips.
Author's comments:
As a child, I felt wounded by early spring. The season had an obvious delicacy and allure, but in a way that intensified instead of diminished its agony, especially in my native Warmia—a northerly Baltic territory known for its penetrating cold and its constant, merciless wind. Even though everything seemed to grow back, to spring to new life, death held sway: called us by our name, haunted body and spirit, grabbed us by our throats. Not for nothing, our ancestors had their feast of the dead in the spring. And now, of course, it's when Holy Week occurs for Christians, when the overwhelming silence and empty tomb are meant to offer proof of resurrection. This poem appears in my book Teraz i zawsze (Now and forever) (Instytut Mikołajewski, 2022).
