And then, early spring 1947, he writes
a poem called "The Song Of A Bird On The Banks
Of The Potomac."
So it's beginning to--
when the magnolias bloom--
I should say, he was very successful.
I mean his appetite for work was really extraordinary.
He was very successful in New York in the consulate.
So he was transferred to the embassy in Washington.
Where he became the cultural attache,
which involved him promoting Polish culture in various ways.
Traveling with textile artists, trying to sell,
create a market for Polish textiles.
Took him to New Mexico, took him to California,
he went to Chicago to try to set up a Polish studies
program at the University.
He got a car and a driver's license.
He's learning.
He and his wife have a child.
When the magnolias bloom, and the park
is a splash of muddy green, I hear your song
on the banks of Potomac on evenings, lulled
to sleep by cherry petals.
Please pardon the absence of those emotions that
lead one back by force to places in springtimes long forgotten
so that poets might seduce the young with patriotic feeling,
might press the longing heart, coloring
the muddle of childhood and youth in a blur of tears.
I find this unpleasant.
Why should I recall Ponary--
He grew up in Lithuania, in Vilno.
And the hill where people went hiking, the Catalinas of--
was Ponary.
Why should I recall Ponary, yellow with young leaves,
with the almond scent of daphne shrubs, the calls of grouse
echoing in the forest?
Why should I enter again the dark halls of King Sigismund
August High School?
Or prod the pines with a great whip
on the road from [? Jany ?],, where Słowacki--
the Keats of Polish poetry--
where Słowacki once did?
We played our games on the [? maryjanka ?]
or played we were courtiers of King Vladislaus's hall.
The story of our loves and our partings, or were they the love
songs of the Philomaths?
Philomaths was a student underground club
in favor of romanticism and Polish liberation.
I no longer recall that.
Bird, graceful bird, you who sing to me today
the same song that an Indian hunter must have heard here
standing with his bow on the deer path.
How can you know if the passing of generations
or the succession of forms in the course of a single life,
those traces of my youth were not
effaced by the momentum of the seasons only?
I was witness to misfortunes.
I know what it means to cheat life with the colors of memory.
I listen to your lovely tones with joy.
Here on the great Earth spring is
renewing, our home of a second.
In it, the world's beginnings, so sing.
Shower the dew of song, from the banks of the Potomac,
onto the pearl of these ash gray waters.
Washington, 19.