Ernest Bryll, born in 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, is a very popular poet, writer, lyricist, journalist, translator (from Irish, Czech and Yiddish), film critic, and diplomat. Among his foreign country postings is a 1991-1995 ambassadorship to the Irish Republic. He is an author of some fifty volumes of poetry, plays, and prose, and a co-translator of seven books on Irish literature. Some of his plays have attained record popularity with audiences, such as Painted on Glass, which has been performed on stage in Bratislava, Slovakia, continuously since 1974. His poems have been adapted as lyrics for hit songs by some of the best Polish singers.
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka writes and translates poems in English and Polish, does painting and photography. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Between Here and There and On the Verge of Light and Shadow. Her poems have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and magazines in both the U.S. and Poland, most recently in the Stranger at Home: Anthology of American Poetry with an Accent and on line in the Loch Raven Review. Her translations of poems by Lucille Clifton, Josephine Jacobsen, and Linda Pastan have been published in Poland. She is the translator for two bilingual books of poems by Lidia Kosk, niedosyt/reshapings and the upcoming Słodka woda, słona woda/Sweet Water, Salt Water.
Spring 2009
Table of Contents - Vol. V, No. 1
Poetry Interview Translations Fiction Book Reviews
Ernest Bryll
Nearby, nearby it is hardest to hear...
Nearby, nearby it is hardest to hear
If the leaf talks to us. If the angel has tripped
And gotten soiled in the dirty puddle that
Remains forever on the road ahead.
From nearby it is the longest path to travel
To hear something, someone’s call for help.
Too close the cry. Not audible so near.
Too close, it stinks. No room to breathe.
Oh, it’s better from afar. First, we catch our breaths
Then we compose long letters
To the angel. Let him come to the one who calls
Apparently for help. The angel knows
For he looks from above.
Let’s not doubt
The ones from afar are nearby.
The lamb on brittle legs
Stood in a faded meadow. Waiting
He might live or be dead
-- All in the man’s hands
And the hands squeezed the air
Trembling to the very horizon
And a dirty finger covered
Even parts of heaven
We little people lost on the journey
-- And what could we have done?
-- What could we have used to stop
The giant's ruthless hands?
And yet so many ran
Toward the darkness -- As into flames
The army of paupers
Fought for the innocent lamb
To fall asleep in eternity’s palm – in peace
As if its fingers were never
To close, to clench, to lock
Around you
Into a fist smaller than a day, a moment
A second...
A grave
In the gale like a river thickening above
We heard your breath – oh, angry God
And rather than fall, perish in the flood
We nailed together our fragile boats
And rather than like wax in the Lord’s hand melting
We chose the art of sailing
The one who harmed a simple man
Will find verse-makers who will erase all
And a historian deft with arguments
Who will sculpt the events with such a noble face
As events have never worn before
The one who perpetrated harm – if he gets through
Will find his own justice in the ages' darkness
Though he sowed storms he will have a sweet harvest
Such is the experience. And we would want
The words of a poet to be feared
The emperors to sweat in their crumpled sheets
Thinking what has been written about them
Such is the experience, always known
And always the stupid poets run against it
-- Translated from the Polish by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
© Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
