At dawn as you’re leaving
your contours shucked out of night
a bright violin
your birch hips
bowed
taut strings
still vibrating.
Enveloped encased
by your touch
a cover of caresses
so sweet
I will not drift off into sleep.
Eyelids open wider
are now filled by a day
as bright as the white of an eye
and as pure.
Tadeusz Różewicz is widely considered to be the most influential post-war Polish poet. He has published over twenty volumes of poetry, and is a major playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. He lives in Wrocław, Poland. Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz, translated and annotated by Joanna Trzeciak, will be published by Norton in 2010.
Joanna Trzeciak teaches in the NEOMFA program in creative writing at Kent State University. Her translations have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and the Paris Review, among others. Miracle Fair, a collection of her translations of Wisława Szymborska, was awarded the 2001 Heldt Translation Prize.
