In the late '80s, some years after I did Poland/1931,
we went to Poland for the first time.
And some part of it was devastating,
the visits to Auschwitz and to Treblinka,
and particularly where part of my family had been murdered,
so I did a series of poems.
Poland/1931 was the imagination of the mind.
Never been in Poland.
When I started writing it, I didn't know much about Poland,
but there are ways of finding out.
The new book was called Khurbn, which
is the word that, in my family, we used during the war
to talk about what was happening in Europe.
And people very well knew what was happening in Europe then.
Khurbn, a word for disaster, going back
to destruction of this temple or that temple.
"In the dark word 'khurbn,' all their lights went out.
Their words were silences, memories,
drifting along the horse roads onto Malkiner Street.
A disaster in the mother's tongue, her words emptied
by speaking, returning to a single word,
to the child word, spoken, red-eyed on the frozen pond
was how they spoke it.
How I would take it from your voice and cradle it.
That ancient and dark word.
Those who spoke it in the old days now held their tongues."
Dos Oysleydikn.
The Emptying.
"At Honey Street in Ostrowa, family town.
At Honey Street in Ostrowa, where did the honey people go?
Empty, empty, Miodowa, empty.
Empty bakery and empty road to Warsaw.
Yellow wooden houses and houses plastered up with stucco.
The shadow of an empty name still
on their door as Shaddai and shadow
shattering the mother tongue.
The mother's tongue but empty, the way
the streets are empty where we walk
pushing past crowds of children, old women airing themselves
outside the City Hall.
Old farmers riding empty carts down empty roads who don't
dispel but make an emptiness.
A taste of empty honey, empty rolls
you push your fingers through.
Empty sorrel soup dribbling from their empty mouths
defining some other Poland lost to us
the way the moon is lost to us.
Sorrel in gardens, mother of God at roadsides.
In the reflection of the empty trains,
only the cattle bellow in like Jews.
The dew-eyed wanderer is still present.
Still the flies cover their eyelids.
The trains drive eastward, falling down
a hole, a Holocaust, of empty houses
and empty ladders leaning against haystacks no
one climbs.
Empty Ostrowa and empty Ostrolenka.
Old houses empty in the woods near Wyzkow.
Dachas the peasants would rent to you and sleep in stables.
The Bialo Forest, spreading to every side,
retreating the closer we come to it to claim it.
Empty oaks and empty fir trees.
A man in an empty ditch who reads a book the way
the Jews once read in the cold Polish light.
The fathers sat there too.
The mothers pose at the woods' edge.
The road led brightly to Treblinka and other towns.
Beaches at Brok along the Bug.
Marshes with cattails.
Cows tied to trees past which their ghosts walk.
Their ghosts refuse to walk.
Tomorrow, in empty fields of Poland
still cold against their feet.
An empty pump, black water drips from, will form a hill of ice.
The porters will dissolve with burning sticks.
They will find the babe's face at the bottom,
invisible and frozen, imprinted in the rock."