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TWO POEMS:

Pigtail

When all the women in the transports

had their heads shaved

four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs

swept up

and gathered up the hair

Behind clean glass

the stiff hair lies

of those suffocated in gas chambers

there are pins and side combs

In this hair

The hair is not shot through with light

Is not parted by the breeze

Is not touched by any hand

Or rain or lips

In huge chests

clouds of dry hair

Of those suffocated

And a faded plait

A pigtail with a ribbon

Pulled at school

By naughty boys.

Ed. Note: “Pigtail,” is tough reading, tough enough that it may leave the reader choked up and speechless. Written in 1948 by Polish Poet Tadeusz Ròzewicz, it was translated by Adam Czerniawski. It was inspired by the Auschwitz Museum. Ròzewicz served as a resistance fighter in World War II. He is still alive and is one of Poland’s most revered poets. “Pigtail” reminds one of the power and authority that may be found in a few simple lines of poetry.

For a more joyous and optimistic contrast to the above, lines From “Locksley Hall”

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

--Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume I - Number 4 - December 2004

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