I did not know about Poland’s storks, and they are delightful. A wonderful surprise, on the roadside as we drove through bucolic scenes almost surreal in their beauty. I made E. stop by the side of the road so I could take photos. They’re not epic, but they give you a sense. Storks are good luck in Poland, and having a stork near your house brings prosperity (and fertility, obv). There are over 50,000 nests in the country, and locals put them up (like these below). 25% of the world’s storks come back to Poland each Spring (lucky us, timing wise). The storks may be my favourite thing about this beautiful country.
Not too long ago, we drove down a side road to see the Bug River, and look across the water to Ukraine. We really wanted to go to Ukraine, but we could not because the world is a mad place and Ukraine is at war with mad men.
I was reading about Poland and its storks and found this poem which I love. It’s fitting, then, to add it here. Slava Ukraini.
Untitled (?) by Natalia Beltchenko (bolding mine)
And as the world vomits up war
And retreats into emptiness,
Spring’s begun dividing
her storks and cranes among us
There’s a power in this northern migration,
Edging out fear and assent,
While out on the spring ice
A primordial evil lands in your hands
The future tense and past tense
Got stuck in the muck of grammar
The storks fell asleep in their nests
Not yet having arrived
Only the Ukrainian Army and its volunteers
are awake. In this countdown to a new era—
a baby born in a basement
will receive the holy tablets
To be able, like a night moth,
to whisper to this moment, “stop”
and reach the light, crawl behind the backdrop,
as though it had never been winter.
The moth would fly off to the muse Urania,
to a branch of Iwaszkiewicz’s pine.
The vintner is pouring the birds his wine,
growing painlessly drunk, himself.
Lullaby of winter, rock me, leave me
in a warm fur coat to write poetry,
drive the hares from the apple trees,
so they won’t eat the shoots, visit the seeds
of dreams, visit your loved ones, us,
let it be Christmastime again.
And after that, spring, and our soldiers alive,
and the moth is inside the sleeve…
*
Yesterday, I put on my father’s pants.
They fit me now.
I remember him well in them
around the age I am now.
Tanned. Elusive.
Or was I running slowly around him?
Tо the place where his pants were the color of coffee with milk,
and not vomit with vodka.
I always ran with a much older crowd.
Searching, I guess, for the fisherman, the amateur photographer,
the grower of tomatoes under a heat-lamp
for my Christmas-birthday,
the electrical engineer, far away
in my childhood forests,
that one, who at fourteen,
saw his first lightbulb.
*
The forest is almost ours,
like the salt in the salt-shaker.
It’s calm and has no fear,
for from its mouth and eyelashes bird to bird
and ravine to ravine
nod as if to friends:
and you are glad.
Ulysses, forest, come back to us,
for my father has merged with you
and has become like you—
squirrely, snowy and avian,
if only I could send my son
your letters.
*
Snow is falling on Krakow the kind
that slows your phrases and slows your actions
that slows the tears dripping from your lashes
out of wartime fear for Kyiv
Krakow’s a raincoat, a junior size,
where you find yourself hidden deep in a pocket
Unharmed, and in the other side
live despair and pain that don’t subside.
You are Szymborska’s cigarette lighter
inside that pocket, the one on the right.
But trouble’s spilled out in the left,
Like the floodlands of Irpin.
Translated, from the Ukrainian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
Sourced on LitHub