Christmas Eve’s Poem

by Edward Szymański

If you were born today
In an ordinary, not some sacred way
You would be someone's child in Lodz
On the fourth floor of basement

Instead of shepherd's flutes
- sirens’ wail
Frankincense, gold and myrrh
- night in dirt and dust
The days are always the same
It's not quieter or brighter
When someone is born
Or when one perishes

No king would come
- nor western or eastern
Useless prophecies and stars
- for tired and hungry
Nobody would herald your coming
No advertisement in the press
In a narrow street of life
You'd be gone like a pebble

A merry day, the lord is born

The Work

by Edward Szymański

Maybe we never were
Maybe we don't
There is only the great love
And bready, wide soil

Above us, in the blue sky
Someone lit the bright sun.
Through country and city roads
We will pass, silent and small.

Our names will pass away
In the new, bright and dark days
Younger, stronger arms
Will take our daily effort.

Maybe more complex, or simpler,
From the ground, like from a primer,
Someone will teach about love
Beauty and truth of combat.

And what’s left of us
Is something that always comes back:
Great, greatest love,
And simple, simplest work.

20 Million

by Edward Szymański

If you could gather all of us
And give us rifles,
Cannons and poisonous gas
Like a river would run

Our blood

And we don't want to die, don’t want to rot in the trenches like lice
We don't want a barbed wire, orders, parades and masses
Take a good look at us, count all of us over again
Tomorrow, or maybe today, we will stop suffering and be silent

Then they would drive all of us
And give us rifles
Like a rive would run again
From Marne to Berezyna

Our blood

Good gracious we were forgotten by our father – God
Somewhere in the distant stars, he doesn't know about our hunger
There is no more bread for us - so do not feed us hope
There's no more room for us – it is a time of bloated lies

Forty million hands
Forty million legs
Twenty million breasts
And in each breast a heart

Przemsza

by Edward Szymański

If you have patience and some newspapers,
Go and look in the daily press
How many poems do poets write
About the Vistula, the Dunajec and the Neman

Because by the Vistula two capitals and COP,
By the Dunajec – the mountains, the Neman - the woods.
Vistula, Neman, Dunajec. And stop.
Plenty of water in variety of colours.

You’ve read the reports and the poems
A nation, you say, smart in geography.
And about the Przemsza, the Black and the White
No one has ever been able to write.

Because no mountain wind blows over the Przemsza
The day itself wakes up smeared in coal
Because by the Przemsza the soil is full of hollows
Because by the Przemsza lies Dąbrowa Basin

The river runs through the slag and the coal dust
It has no whirlpools, no deepness.
Over the black clumps of heap
Chimneys, chimneys, chimneys.

Work and smoke over the Basin
And not really blue sky
After a day of work, dirty and bitter
The evening blooms with thousands of lamps.
The ground is bound from top to bottom
With strings of wires, shackles of rails.

The White Przemsza – steel and lead
The Black Przemsza - coal and zinc

The Plant On The Grout Stands

folk lyrics

The plant, the plant on the grout stands
Who would set me free from the plant

No mother will do it, no father will
Like a mother’s good child would set me free,

Everything works fine in the plant
The machine goes smoothly into the cylinder.

It only seems to me that it's not enough for a day's work,
And for me, a girl from Sosnowiec, the morewould be better.

Thirty copecks and a slice of bread,
From six o’clock till six o’clock you have to grab the thread

The Dąbrowa Basin

by Władysław Broniewski

The basin mines the coal
There is no other law around here
Over the night’s horizon
A muddy, bloody glow

The Basin is chasing the profit
The Basin is chasing the bread
A trail red sparks
Blow under the black sky

The Basin mines the coal
Ships it to west and east
And turns a black power
Into a pestilence, misery and famine.

Tell me, oh crude land,
Whose homeland are you?
Dąbrowa is ominously silent
In the night of hunger, crisis, fascism.

The muddy street is silent,
The miners know who their enemy
There's a cop around the corner
And God above him

A crisis in heavy industry
A miners’ slave wages
Their faces – disloyal
Their houses - anti-state!

The coal takes over the Basin
The basin takes over death.
For anger, oh my song,
Drill into the heart of the earth!

Red And Black

by Edward Szymański

Cheap black ink writes everyday words
Writes inept words, then blurs and fades away.

Slowly, the heavy plow of pen breaks the silence
Joy and suffering flows onto a paper from a palm of a hand

Life rises in words,whoosh rustles on the page
Sentences flourish, like a bouyant, relentless rye.

They grow and grow to the eyes, words heavy like ears
Until the censor reaps them down with a pencil.

What the rain won't wash away, what won't dry in the sun
The stones, silent on the streets, will tell you.

The word rises in silence. But with a cry of despair
Not on paper – on the pavement – and not on black it marks

It doesn't grow from the tip of a nib like an ard mark
But flies into the city's streets from bullets and bayonets.

Its wings are faster than bullets, its reach is greater than shots
It calls boldly and loudly over the roar of the charge

His speech is festive, his speech is ordinary
And understood by everyone from Madrid to Vienna.

Cyankali

by Władysław Szlengel

From hundreds of thousands of pale lips
From the throats of a thousand constrained women
Rises a fervent plea to the heavens
And a chorus of complaints.

It rips out of a thousand mouths
And leaves trail of blood behind
The cry - a question, the women shout
Exhausted with pain
Where is our law?!

And when the procedure is done
And the fetus fades into shadows
When the blood flows out of the womb
The "viciously killed" embryo will perish

Imprisonment!

It rips out from a thousand mouths
And leaves trail of blood behind
The cry - a question, the women shout
Exhausted with pain

Where is our law?!

It rips out from a thousand mouths
A cry that burns our souls
When there is no solution, nor care
What is left for us?

Cyankali

For years the victims constantly
Die from the procedure
No would stop the world
Five drops a day.