Day of Remembrance at the United Nations and in Family History

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops came into the largely empty death and concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Its prisoners were sent on the death march towards Germany. Only few were left behind. The United Nations selected this day to establish the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The more time passes since the war, the more people want to forget or deny that it happened. It is important to remember. All the more so, that people who have seen and heard what happened when it happened are dying out. It is important to record their memories, even if these memories are not exact and fit for official historical record. Even if they are garbled in family stories, passed on from grandmother, to mother, to daughter, transmitted from grandfather, to father, to son.

 Born in Warsaw, Poland, with ancestral roots in Podlasie and Kresy - eastern borderlands of Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, now divided between these three countries - I used to travel to visit the tombs of my grandparents every October, for All Souls Day, Zaduszki. On the way we passed through a small town with a cemetery right by the road. What happened is in my poem.

Zaduszki

The arch of candlelight in the night sky
above the town of Kałuszyn greets them on the way
to the grandparents’ village. Zaduszki.
All Souls’ Day – the annual visit to the cemetery.

They drive towards the yellow halo
above charcoal horizon. Aunt Basia reminds her:
You have to remember. This town was Jewish
and they were all killed. There’s nobody left
to light a candle for them. They don’t even have tombs.
They were all taken, all murdered.
Other people moved into their houses.
Beyond the moss-covered stone wall
of the village cemetery in freshly plowed fields
her grandparents twin tombstones
rest in the reassuring golden shade
of ancient chesnut and oak.

Candles, chrysanthemum, flower wreaths.
They walk in the rustling leaves,
pray, think of the past.
She tries to imagine the empty town,
the unnamed strangers.

Thirty years later, in Montreal, she sees her first Jew,
in a long satin robe, yarmulke, with curly locks of hair.
She smiles, finally relieved of her duty.
They remember.

(C) 2014 by Maja Trochimczyk

This poem is a part of a new book I suddenly started writing, What Children Learn from War with bits and pieces remembered by my parents, my grandparents, my friend's mother. With bits and pieces heard and seen. With lessons what to do and how to behave to survive. I started thinking about it because I had to. Invited to a conference on "The Musical World of Polish Jews, 1920-1960" at the Arizona State University in Tempe, I decided to educate myself on the historical context of the musical lives I was writing about. My study of "Jewish Composers of Polish Music in 1943" evolved into a different paper, seeking to show the extensive presence of Jewish musicians in Polish musical life in the interwar period, and their displacement or destruction afterwards. For the context, I read some books, then decided to see what happened and, thanks to YouTube, was able to watch documentaries. The most striking one was about the trials of German guards caught by Soviets at the extermination camp in Majdanek near Lublin. Their complete lack of remorse, their inability to understand that what they did - kill Jews - was wrong. They turned to their accusers, not comprehending: "But we did not kill you, guys. We had to do what we did. We just killed Jews."

For these men, quickly relieved of their lack of comprehension by the "guilty" verdict and a public execution, the Jews were not human beings. Over 100 death camps guards were convicted and executed in Poland, under Soviet rule, only about 10 in Germany, liberated by American and Allied troops. The purpose of remembering the Jewish victims is obvious: this was an unprecedented crime against humanity, crime against all of us.

I went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time this year. I was very impressed with the scope and tone of the exhibits. As a Pole, I was also grateful for an extensive and fair portrayal of the suffering of all Polish people: the Slavs, in accordance with their name, given to them back in the times of the Roman Empire - sclave/slave - were to be slave laborers. Their leaders - teachers, priests, university professors, officers - murdered, their schools and colleges closed. Poland was the first country invaded by Hitler that fought the invasion. The first country that never formed a government supportive of the Nazi rule. The country with over 400,000 people involved in the  underground Home Army - armed resistance. The country with the largest number of the Righteous among the Nations in the world.

Some people want to use the term "Holocaust" for other victims. It is and should be limited to the Jews and Gypsies, who were both scheduled for complete annihilation. It is hard to visualize a crime of such monumental proportions, executed in a frenzy, accelerating towards the end of the war: when all was lost and the ring was tightening around Germany, they still have time to kill the Jews. Calling it crazy does not do it. But visiting the Museum is a step towards understanding.

One exhibit struck me - the photographic record of the entire shtetl of Ejszyszki, from 1890 to 1942. All its Jewish inhabitants were killed but the photographs somehow survived and now form the inside of a circular tower that spans several floors. You can look up from the ground floor and see the small photographs way up high, with details disappearing. You can look down from the second floor and see the generations receding into shadows. The exhibit is masterly, as it brings the ordinary lives of ordinary people to our attention. Just like you and me. They went to school, worked, married, had fun, posed for family portraits... This exhibit filled in the blank that I had in my mind about that empty ghost town of Kaluszyn that we drove by each year and I had to remember. I did not know what to remember, just that it was empty after the war. So this is how these people looked like. Us. I went into the Hall of Remembrance, lighted a candle - just one candle - for all the people from Kaluszyn whom I never knew. Never had a chance to know. Germans made sure of that. I also lit a candle for the victims from my mother's family.

Thanks to the efforts of family historians Waldemar Wajszczuk and Barbara Miszta, we know how many people in the extended Polish family Wajszczuk from Podlasie have been incarcerated in Auschwitz, who died there. Who was a prisoner in Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Majdanek. Who died there.  www.wajszczuk.v.pl

My family is not Jewish, yet claims quite a few victims. And freedom fighters. Father Karol Wajszczuk (b. 1887 – d. 1942) was a prisoner of the Lublin Castle since April 1940, he was then moved to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau on December 14, 1940. He died on 28 May 1942 in the Castle Hartheim in a gas chamber built to exterminate the disabled for the Euthanasia program. His father, Piotr, was the brother of Franciszek, the patriarch of the Wajszczuk-Trochimczyk branch. He was a chaplain for a small cell of Polish freedom fighters, an underground group called "Our Eagles" and including the following men: Stefan Kowalczuk, Bazyli Łaźko, Adolf Młynarczuk, Feliks Szafrański, Józef Krawiecki, Tomasz Stańczuk, Jan Dąbrowski and Bolesław Hawryluk killed in Auschwitz; Stanisław Daniluk arrested and murdered by the Gestapo in Radzyń Podlaski; Jan Ciechowski and Jan Saczuk, also murdered by Germans. "Only Jan Kozłowiec, imprisoned in the Lublin castle, was rescued by members of the Warsaw diversion section of AK" - states the memorial site for Father Wajszczuk in his home parish of Drelow.

His cousin, Father Feliks Wajszczuk (b. 1902 – d. 1973) was in Sachenhausen, then in Dachau since 14 December 1940 and was liberated by Americans on 25 May 1945. He spent the rest of his life in a monastery in France, since his damaged health did not allow him to work. All together, seven members of the extended Wajszczuk family were imprisoned by the Nazis at the infamous Lublin Castle. Two died there and one, Józef Wajszczuk, died in Auschwitz where he was sent in April 1942 and died on 20 December 1942. “Known” as “Mały” he was a member of the Polish Underground (Home Army). Three other members of the extended family were killed fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944: Barbara, Wojciech, and Antoni Wajszczuk. They followed in death their father Edmund (Karol’s brother) who was also involved with the Polish underground.

I wrote about them in two poems. Their memories should be carried forward to the younger generations. I did not want to know, did not want to remember. I was "allergic" to all these monuments to the victims, commemorations, the entire month of April spent on national "martyrology"... Too much for a teenager wanting to study music, read books, go to art exibits. Too much for a young "social butterfly" flitting from an art opening to a new music premiere.

Standing Guard

Enough with the cemeteries, martyrs.
Who cares? Not she, forced to stand
at a tombstone for some fifty strangers
in the freezing rain of April.
She shivers in a white shirt, pleated navy skirt,
a school sweater. The longest hour
of her ten young years.

Someone gave her an ugly beret
she would have never picked. A red tie?
Not allowed to move, sit, turn, frown,
or scratch her nose. Not allowed to talk
to the other girl. No smiling either. Eyes fixed
straight ahead, looking at a distant point.
The longest hour. This is how the dead
consume the living. Reverse cannibalism.

Would she have been more willing
had her parents told her?

Two great uncles, priests held at Dachau:
one relieved of his ills in a gas chamber,
one liberated, with his body, spirit broken.
A fighter of the Polish underground killed in Auschwitz.
Two others hanged in the Lublin Castle.
A denounced Home Army soldier
who came back alive from Majdanek and Gross Rosen.
Three siblings went to fight in the Warsaw Uprising,
were buried in ruins in September 1944.
Those who perished in the Soviet Gulag.
That officer shot in Katyń.

The list goes on and on.
Is that what a ten-year-old should learn?

The list of my family's victims includes freedom fighters, members of underground resistance. Not ordinary children, babies, mothers, grandmothers, wheel-chair bound invalids. It is the killing of ALL that is unique to the Holocaust. It is the killing in the name of making a new, better world. This, too, we have to remember.

Read, Dream, Pray - and Do Not Kill in the Happy New Year 2014!

The New Year came too fast for me, as I was buried in a mountain of books I simply had to read in order to stop writing nonsense. You know, the more you know, the more you know... and the better writer you are... I welcomed the New Year in a Venetian mask, barely had time to watch the Rose Parade on TV... and flew on a red-eye to Washington, D.C.

                                          At the New Year's Eve Ball, with appropriately dressed Sylvia,
                                                    she had a lovely peacock-feather fan...

But my reading and writing recently had nothing to do with poetry, actually it has been on one of the least poetic of subjects. As Adorno said, after Auschwitz no poetry... So I read on Hitler's Willing Executioners and Lissa's 1952 essays written at the height of the Stalinist take-over of Polish culture, with Soviet imports of mass songs, ideologically "proper" poems (they had lots of problems with that), and socialist realism permeating all aspects of creativity.  I'm glad I do not have to comply with such external requirements just to stay alive and put food on my table.  My research project into the presence of Jewish composers in Polish musical life continues after two conference presentations and countless revisions of my text. 

What about poetry, then?  How about a call to prayer? An old one, from a Museum, but still vibrant, still resounding with that unheard Tibetan Horn. 

A Call to Prayer

The blue-eyed dragon roars.

The air fills with flames.

Time to drop the mundane

Tools and thoughts. Time

To go inward, stand still.

The call to prayer spreads

Throughout the world,

From blaring loudspeakers,

Brittle rosaries hanging from

The taxi-drivers’ rearview mirrors.

The call is loud, omnipresent,

Loud, unheeded. We are

Too fast for blue-eyed dragons,

For rosary beads carved from

Olive trees at Golgotha.

Too busy. The dragon roars.

                                      © 2008 by Maja Trochimczyk

Is prayer a good thing? It depends what we are praying for. Fervid beseeching for more money, or for a misfortune for an enemy - No, not really. But singing a prayer in an unknown language, chanting the words not knowing what they mean? Would that work? 

Scholars from the cognitive music study field have done a lot to show how important music and singing is to personal well-being. We are simply much more happy if we sing regularly with others; the hormones start working, the serotonin flows where it should. Recent advances in neurobiology and the study of the brain have shown the mechanisms of these actions. But people knew this for centuries. That's why choral singing fills in temples and churches. That's also one reason why the personal electronic listening devices are a major threat to humanity's happiness... with those headphones on, we do not sing.  

Here's a poem about a building built to resonate with and amplify the choral sounds...

     The Cathedral

     waves of song

     bounce off the cobblestones

    spill on the rooftops

    stay still, watch

    shadows fle the bronze

    majesty of bells

   morning brightness

   rises in the rhythm

   of the ocean, caressing

   ancient mounds

   of cooled off lava

   at the edge of the dying world

   inside the rib-cage

   of a cathedral

   we learn to breathe

   in the beached whale

   of a building

   the city’s beating heart

     (c) 2013 by Maja Trochimczyk, October 19, 2013

Sometimes, when the forces of darkness take over, the "beating heart" becomes a hologram, empty gesture... That certainly was the case with the Churches in the 1930s and 1940s.  Filled with Christians and racial hatred. But sometimes it is still true. The heart beats with love. Two of my mother's uncles, Feliks and Karol Wajszczuk were prisoners in Dachau. Arrested after being denounced by "not a nice person" they were subject to experiments with malaria, brutal beatings, back-breaking labor without clothes, tools, or shoes, and starvation-level food rations. Karol died in 1943, Feliks survived. Did I mention both were Catholic priests and both were involved in the anti-German resistance? 

Let me end this New Year's story with a great poet and an inspired poem... that's close to the topic of my study, and my heart. 

Ice, Eden

There is a Land that’s Lost,

Moon waxes in its Reeds,
and all that’s turned to frost
with us, burns there and sees.

It sees, for it has Eyes,
Earths they are, and bright.
Night, Night, Alkalis.
It sees, this Child of Sight.

It sees, it sees, we see,
I see you, you too see.
Ice will rise again before
This Hour shall cease to be. 

Paul Celan (1920-1970)

Celan committed suicide, he could not live with what he experienced and saw around him, with what he lost. By remembering him and other poets of the Age of Darkness we may bring some light into our own world, filled with new perpetrators and new acts of cruelty and horror. 

How about a new New Year Resolution: I will not kill? I will not kill anyone with hatred, rejection, indifference... As the Dalai Lama says, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”  Cheers to a year filled with pomegranates, a year without grenades (both the love-bringing fruit and the love-destroying weapon are named with the same word in Polish, the explosive "granat").

________________

Photos by Maja Trochimczyk

Wishing You Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2014!

The Styrofoam snowman lookalike Santa 

Sits next to a penguin vase
In fake snow, tinsel

A gilded fruit bowl

“Not fit for food consumption”
Pine branches and cones made of plastic

The Night of GMO Christmas

Stores full of sad, frazzled people 
Buying gifts 
They’ll return next Monday

Lasciate omni speranza?
To be is just to have? 

Still, there's the happy warmth 
Of a baby dozing off 
On Grandpa’s lap

A child’s laughing 
At paper angel’s wings

She crumples in her hands

With pink cheeks, smudged by chocolate
From a large bite of a cookie
She made with her Mom
For Santa

“Merry Christmas” - she smiles
And all is well on Earth
And in Heaven
All is well and will be
Tonight

(c) 2013 by Maja Trochimczyk

Ella Fitzgerald "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas: http://youtu.be/9L5mPfpeXxk

Christmas Eve

By Christina Rosetti

Christmas hath a darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answring music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Polish Christmas Carol (Bog sie rodzi): http://youtu.be/wriBVTJY_cA

The Holy Night

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem;
The dumb kine from their fodder turning them,
Softened their horned faces
To almost human gazes
Toward the newly Born:
The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks
Brought their visionary looks,
As yet in their astonied hearing rung
The strange sweet angel-tonge:
The magi of the East, in sandals worn,
Knelt reverent, sweeping round,
With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground,
The incense, myrrh, and gold
These baby hands were impotent to hold:
So let all earthlies and celestials wait
Upon thy royal state.
Sleep, sleep, my kingly One!

Polish Christmas Carol (Lulajze Jezuniu by Mazowsze): http://youtu.be/inoWL5fhZWA

311 (Snow) by Emily Dickinson

It sifts from Leaden Sieves — It powders all the Wood. It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road — It makes an Even Face Of Mountain, and of Plain — Unbroken Forehead from the East Unto the East again — It reaches to the Fence — It wraps it Rail by Rail Till it is lost in Fleeces — It deals Celestial Vail To Stump, and Stack — and Stem — A Summer’s empty Room — Acres of Joints, where Harvests were, Recordless, but for them — It Ruffles Wrists of Posts As Ankles of a Queen — Then stills its Artisans — like Ghosts — Denying they have been — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKG5iJb2kSY  - Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas Song _____________________________ Photos of snowflakes by Wilson Bentley (1865-1931) from Wikipedia under standard terms. Photos of Holly and Poinsettia leaves by Maja Trochimczyk

What are We Thankful for? Autumn Leaves, Whitman, Harvest, Memory...

I have not felt particularly poetic during the last month and my poetry-writing shrank to nothing, my photography also disappeared from the horizon, after the November 9 opening of the  exhibition "Positively Local" at the Modest Fly Gallery in Tujunga, where I had just one photograph on display - of a golden leaf.  

Thankgiving Tanka

 1.

 half-split blood orange 

 rests on wet apricot leaves

 and blue fescue –

 my fall garden waits

 for the sun’s gold smile

     2.

     stacks of books

     in every corner –

     wrapped in a blanket

     of words

     I cherish my cosmos

          3.

          rich flavors of pumpkin spices

          almonds and nutmeg

          fill the kitchen –

          affection

          warms my heart

(c) 2013 by Maja Trochimczyk

The turning of leaves in the fall is very high on my list of things I'm most thankful for.  In golden, intense California light after the rain the leaves are more beautiful than ever. Sublime and with such intricate, gorgeous detail... but I lost my iPhone, broke my camera, so now I can only look and remember. 

Through October  I worked on my music history project, "Jewish Composers of Polish Music in 1943" -  a paper invited for the international conference entitled "The Musical Worlds of Polish Jews 1920 1960" and held at the Arizona State University.  It was an amazing gathering of minds, with a keynote address by Prof. Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University, live music by the ART Ensemble of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and many fascinating lectures by scholars from Poland, U.K., Australia, Canada and the U.S.  

In my project this time I decided to count the names, this time: from 173 composers listed in 1939, 101 were still alive abroad (most of them have emigrated before the war) and 12 in Poland. Looking through the outlines of the composers' lives - destroyed and twisted by absolute evil, tossed around the world by winds of history... It is not an easy topic. We want to hear about the winners, the survivors, the heroes: we do not want this senseless, absurd, pointless death. I was not even born then, so what I can do? The only thing - remember: Koffler and Gold who died, Tansman, Palester, Kassern, Laks who survived... And be thankful for their gift of music.

Here is a suite in Polish style by Alexandre Tansman for solo guitar: 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPeXLnwo60w&list=PL4C4FC8D97710A03F


And here's Artur Gold's perennially popular tango "Jesienne Roze" from a historical 1932 recording by Adam Aston  - also a Jewish-Polish musician, who survived with the Anders' Army that gathered the refugees and exiles, including war orphans and those released from Soviet camps and left via Iran and Palestine to fight in Africa and Italy. Aston lived, Gold died in Treblinka in 1942 or 1943, after conducting the death camp orchestra and composing the Treblinka Song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_sBkaKIcRE



A popular version, recorded by Irena Santor in the 1960s:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_a1x-v8zgI




American Thanksgiving is a strange holiday about eating turkeys with sweet yams and cranberry sauce, topped off by pumpkin pie, with whipped cream. If you put marshmallows onto yams, you'll be drowning in sugar... white death in installments... The encounters of Indians and Pilgrims in the New World that we are remembering in this holiday, were far from idyllic sharing of the harvest and ended with a wholesale cultural genocide of the First Nations replaced by Anglo-Saxon invaders, followed by hungry waves of immigrants from impoverished areas of Europe, Asia, Africa... There's blood and death in all this sugar.

So, here's a sweet poem about  thanksgiving and blood: 

The Day of Peaches

Maja Trochimczyk


In England, I'd get a ticket for that bite
into the succulent flesh
of O'Henry peach - eating while driving

The peach shines butter yellow to orchid orange, 
blood red -  a blazing rainbow dissipates
into tart sweetness on my tongue

Who picked it? One of the young marines
with shaved heads that ran through the orchard
before being shipped off to war?

The man at the fruit stand said
he managed a machine shop for the marines
and ran five miles with them each morning

He silently packs my peaches, one for the road
I have a bite - warm juice spills on my chin
I think of the Great War, other wars

The marines' blood spilling on cold sand
of the beach, staining the sidewalk - 
I sigh in Thanksgiving 

(C) 2013 by Maja Trochimczyk

_____________________________

The fall harvest celebration has ancient, agrarian roots and its variants may be found in different cultures around the world. In pre-Slavic Poland we had - later Christianized - "Dozynki" (The Gleaning or Last Harvest), at the end of the summer harvest, in late August or early September.  The harvesting in the fields started about a month earlier, with the offering the first cut of rye, wheat, or barley to the pagan deities of the fields. Long stems were cut by hand with a sickle and woven into a doll, securely placed on a high fence, overlooking the fields for good luck and the blessings of sunny weather, without summer storms. An offering of water, milk or wine was spilled on the ground in front of the doll, before the start of the harvest. The doll was taken back home after the completion of the harvest... but I do not remember what happened to it later. I remember seeing it up on the fence and being sternly admonished not to touch it by my officially Eastern Orthodox, and actually ancient Pagan grandmother who made it, still faithful to an ancient pagan custom in the 1960s...

In feudal times, the harvest festival ended with bringing in the gifts to the manor, and with a feast for everyone, celebrating the successful gathering of grain to feed the village and the nobility through the next year.   A beautiful depiction of this festival starts Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Oniegin. 



Dozynki is now an official state holiday both in Poland and in Czech Republic, returning to their ancient roots, and making sure we do not forget about our reliance on agriculture and working together with nature to nourish us in a sustainable, healthy way...

Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski -Dozynki (1910)

Instead of writing my own poem for Dozynki, let me share an American classic:


A Carol of Harvest for 1867 

by Walt Whitman 

(published in 1867, reprinted in the 1872 edition 
of Leaves of Grass as “The Return of the Heroes”)

1 A song of the grass and fields! A song of the soil, and the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of the soil of the fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize. 2 For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for myself, Now I awhile return to thee, O soil of Autumn fields, Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee, Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart, Tuning a verse for thee. O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice! O harvest of my lands! O boundless Summer growths! O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb! O theatre of time, and day, and night! A verse, to seek to see, to narrate thee. 3 For still upon this stage, I acted God’s calm, annual drama; Gorgeous processions, songs of birds, Sunrise, that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul, The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves, The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees, The flowers, the grass, the lilliput, countless armies of the grass, The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages, The scenery of the snows, the wind’s free orchestra, The stretching, light-hung roof of clouds, the clear cerulean, and the bulging, silvery fringes, The high dilating stars, the placid, beckoning stars, The shows of all the varied soils, and all the growths and products, The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows, These for all ages’, races’ witnessing. 4 Fecund America! To-day, Thou art all over set in births and joys! Thou groan’st with riches! thy wealth clothes thee as with a swathing garment! Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions! A myriad-twining life, like interlacing vines, binds all thy vast demesne! As some huge ship, freighted to water’s edge, thou ridest into port! As rain falls from the heaven, and vapors rise from the earth, so have the precious values fallen upon thee, and risen out of thee! Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle! Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty! Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns! Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle, and lookest out upon thy world, and lookest East, and lookest West! Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles—that giv’st a million farms, and missest nothing! Thou All-Acceptress—thou Hospitable—(thou only art hospitable, as God is hospitable.) 5 When last I sang, sad was my voice; Sad were the shows around me, with deafening noises of hatred, and smoke of conflict; In the midst of the armies, the Heroes, I stood, Or pass’d with slow step through the wounded and dying. But now I sing not War, Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps, Nor the regiments hastily coming up, deploying in line of battle. No more the dead and wounded; No more the sad, unnatural shows of War. Ask’d room those flush’d immortal ranks? the first forth-stepping armies? Ask room, alas, the ghastly ranks—the armies dread that follow’d. 6 Pass—pass, ye proud brigades! So handsome, dress’d in blue—with your tramping, sinewy legs; With your shoulders young and strong—with your knapsacks and your muskets; (How elate I stood and watch’d you, where, starting off, you march’d!) Pass;—then rattle, drums, again! Scream, you steamers on the river, out of whistles loud and shrill, your salutes! For an army heaves in sight—O another gathering army! Swarming, trailing on the rear—O you dread, accruing army! O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea! with your fever! O my land’s maimed darlings! with the plenteous bloody bandage and the crutch! Lo! your pallid army follow’d! 7 But on these days of brightness, On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes, the high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and barns, Shall the dead intrude? Yet the dead mar not—they also fit well in Nature; They fit very well in the landscape, under the trees and grass, And along the edge of the sky, in the horizon’s far margin. Nor do I forget you, departed; Nor in Winter or Summer, my lost ones; But most, in the open air, as now, when my soul is rapt and at peace—like pleasing phantoms, Your dear memories, rising, glide silently by me. 8 I saw the return of the Heroes; (Yet the heroes never surpass’d, shall never return; Them, that day, I saw not.) I saw the great corps, I saw them approaching, defiling by, with divisions, Each, at its head, in the midst of his staff, the General. I saw the processions of armies, Streaming northward, their work done, they paused awhile in clusters of mighty camps. No holiday soldiers!—youthful, yet veterans; Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and workshop, Harden’d of many a long campaign and sweaty march, Inured on many a hard-fought, bloody field. 9 A pause—the armies wait; A million flush’d, embattled conquerors wait; The world, too, waits—then, soft as breaking night, and sure as dawn, They melt—they disappear. Exult, indeed, O lands! victorious lands! Not there your victory, on those red, shuddering fields; But here and hence your victory. Melt, melt away, ye armies! disperse, ye blue-clad soldiers! Resolve ye back again—give up, for good, your deadly arms; Other the arms, the fields henceforth for you, or South or North, or East or West, With saner wars—sweet wars—life-giving wars. 10 Loud, O my throat, and clear, O soul! The season of thanks, and the voice of the carol of full-yielding; The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility. All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me; I see the true arenas of my race and land—or first, or last, Man’s innocent and strong arenas. I see the Heroes at other toils; I see, well-wielded in their hands, the better weapons. 11 I see where America, Mother of All, Well-pleased, with full-spanning eye, gazes forth, dwells long, And counts the varied gathering of the products. Busy the far, the sunlit panorama; The western fields appear, with endless, prodigal surface; (The steam-ploughs and horse-ploughs did their work well, and the rotary spader did its work well.) Lo! prairie, orchard, and the yellow grain of the North, Cotton and rice of the South, and Louisiana cane; Open, unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy, Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine, And many a stately river flowing, and many a jocund brook, And healthy uplands with their herby-perfumed breezes, And the good green grass—that delicate miracle, the ever-recurring grass. 12 Toil on, Heroes! harvest the products! Not alone on those warlike fields, the Mother of All, With dilated form and lambent eyes, watch’d you. Toil on, Heroes! toil well! Handle the weapons well! The Mother of All—yet here, as ever, she watches you. 13 Well-pleased, America, thou beholdest, Over the fields of the West, those crawling monsters, The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements: Beholdest, moving in every direction, imbued as with life, the revolving hay-rakes, The steam-power reaping-machines, and the horse-power machines, The engines, thrashers of grain, and cleaners of grain, well separating the straw, The power-hoes for corn-fields—the nimble work of the patent pitch-fork; Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the cotton-gin, and the rice-cleanser. Beneath thy look, O Maternal, With these, and else, and with their own strong hands, the Heroes harvest. All gather, and all harvest; (Yet but for thee, O Powerful! not a scythe might swing, as now, in security; Not a maize-stalk dangle, as now, its silken tassels in peace.) 14 Under Thee only they harvest—even but a wisp of hay, under thy great face, only; Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin—every barbed spear, under thee; Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee—each ear in its light-green sheath, Gather the hay to its myriad mows, in the odorous, tranquil barns, Oats to their bins—the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, to theirs; Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama—dig and hoard the golden, the sweet potato of Georgia and the Carolinas, Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania, Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp, or tobacco in the Borders, Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees, or bunches of grapes from the vines, Or aught that ripens in all These States, or North or South, Under the beaming sun, and under Thee.

On Halloween, All Souls, and All Saints...

Did you decorate your house for Halloween yet? I took out my laughing bats, magic hats, and pumpkins. Yet another year of trying to tame the monster, make the grime and horror go away. I wish to replace the vulgar tastelessness of eyeball soups and skeletons on the lawn with some carnival-style whimsy... I'll be disappointed again, surrounded by plastic atrocities emerging from the closet yet again, as we circle on this merry-go-round of time that accelerates every year. When I started my "Chopin with Cherries" blog in 2010, I wrote about the composer's death, cemeteries and Halloween... Let me start this rant against Halloween, then, with a self-quotation:

  "October in America is filled with the excitement of Halloween. Now, that’s a strange celebration! People dress up as zombies. They scatter eyeballs, skeletons, and torn, bloody limbs around their houses. They convert their gardens into makeshift graveyards… All to scare death away. The spiritual roots of Halloween are in Druidic rituals of the Winter Solstice, a holiday of darkness, marking the shortest day and longest night of the year. What if the night won and the sun never came back? Monsters, ghouls, and horrible, terrifying, dangerous creatures of the dark are supposed to be roaming the world that night, saying “trick or treat” – “bribe me, or I’ll kill you.” 

In a highly commercialized current version of this celebration, a wild party-season culminating on October 31, we conquer our fear of death by dressing up like the dead and dressing our children like cute little ghouls and monsters, to cheat and trick death, pretending we are already dead. There is more to it, of course, beyond the candy giveaway and all-night, carnival parties. To me, this is a day dedicated to fear and rejection of death. We want to live forever. We mock and deny the power of death, by ridiculing it in the most atrocious way possible. People love Halloween. I’m deeply conflicted about it. As a mother, though, I made my share of costumes… 

I remember going to a cemetery on October 31, during my first year in Canada, two months after coming from Poland. It was a culture shock. There was nobody there, the place was abandoned. In the city, stores and yards were full of make-believe tomb-stones, with sculls scattered around and zombies’ hands sticking out of the ground, but nobody went to bring candles and flowers to real graves. In Poland, at this time of the year, we used to visit the grave-sites of our grandparents, great grandparents, or soldiers, or victims of the war. We used to bring candles to these grave-sites and monuments. In the rain, in quickly falling darkness of a late autumn evening, cemeteries and war memorial sites were shrouded by the warm glow of thousands of candles. People wanted to remember their dead, their fore-bearers. They wanted to reflect on the past, think about their own mortality. The All Souls’ Day, October 31, is a melancholy, yet comforting remembrance of our ancestors and a time for reflection on our own place in the dance of generations.

 In Warsaw, where we had no family graves to visit, we went to the monuments of the fallen: the Unknown Soldier, the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. (A handful of underground Home Army soldiers held out for 63 days before being defeated by the Germans, while the Allies waited for the city to bleed to death). We walked through the alleys of Powazki, the oldest cemetery in town, visited the graves of famous Poles. We brought lots of candles; children ran around and made sure all the candles were burning. They had fun: played with fire, skipped over puddles, collected dry, colorful leaves. Adults walked with their umbrellas, and said “shh, shhh… be quiet, this is a cemetery, a place of peace and eternal rest.” 


But it is not the disgusting artificial severed limbs, eyeless sockets of plastic skulls that may truly terrify you. The scary stuff happens behind closed doors, in homes that look so idyllic from afar, with their bright porch light and tidy gardens:

The Hour of Darkness

"Get out of my house!!!"

said the man.

"Look at the knife

in my hand!"

the boy answered.

The woman cried

with her heart split open.

The little girl whispered:

"I wish I were a fairy

and could make myself deaf

to not hear you..."

And it was night. 

__________________

Note: The last line is quoted from The Bible, NIV, the Gospel According to St. John: John 13:30.

(c) 1997 by Maja Trochimczyk 

Sometimes the pain that outlasts all others is internal, invisible, untouched: 

Love Horror

I saw you at the opera:

So royal in your splendidness,

you dispensed favors

left and right,

bestowing graces.

What did you see

in me, a Shulamite

dancing darkly

among throngs

of chaste-less virgins?

Love is a horror of distance -

silent scream

for one kind hour 

(c) 2000 by Maja Trochimczyk

And then, of course, out of a broken heart, a broken present, and no future:

Last Wish

Kiss me with the kiss of death

so my lips stop breathing

kiss me with the kiss of Lete

so its waters wash away

my memory

kiss me, please,

so I could go in peace

to the empty fields of Elysium

for a well deserved stroll in the park

of the late graceful

(c) 2003 by Maja Trochimczyk

Sometimes, things happen that you do not want to remember, do not want to forget. April 4, 2000. The day my parents were shot. May 12, 2001, the day my Father died, after a year in and out of the hospital. His last words to me? About a week before his death: "Majusiu, your Dad has become a vampire! I live off other people's blood." And we laughed at this joke about a very serious matter. His spine cells, exhausted by months of malnutrition, stopped producing red blood cells. He lived because he had a blood transfusion every two weeks. Indeed, a vampire.

Then: July 4, 2013, the day my Mother died. I would not believe it was serious, that trip to the hospital (again!), in an ambulance (again!). I had time to get used to to these phone calls from Poland, month after month, year after year, ambulance, hospital, home, convalescence... I have not written any poems in Poland, any about Her death. I'm still in denial. But I wrote this, when they were shot, on the plane back to L.A., returning after 10 days sitting in the hospital, by their bedside in Warsaw:

The Polish Easter

The bullet pierces the lung,

blood spills in darkness:

shortness of breath,

mouth tied with tape

agony in the basement

cold cement floor

How does one live after that?

Does one live?

Without the stomach,

kidneys, intestines and spleen?

Plastic pipes carry out

all kinds of liquid.

The Polish Easter

is a celebration of

overeating. Food is life.

Would Dad ever eat again?

Would Mom ever breathe without gasping?

Honor your mother and father.

I do.

They did not.

(c) 2000 by Maja Trochimczyk

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Now, both of my parents are gone to the All Souls world.  Where is it? I do not know. What is it? I cannot imagine. It exists, I'm quite certain, as I often feel their presence with me. They both look over my shoulder as I write this, making sure I'm being a good girl. How? Certainly not like that overzealous Guardian Angel in a short story by Slawomir Mrozek; so eager to take care of his charge, a very active boy, he kept hitting and slapping and punishing the youngster for his every move. Unwittingly, the angel caused an adverse reaction. The boy, unable to run out and play with kids without being slapped by his Angel, instead got a chemistry kit, made a bomb, blew up his house, and ran away, followed by the Guardian Angel, limping...

Funeral portraits (taken from coffins), 17th century Polish nobles and noblewomen.
Wilanow Art Gallery, Poland.

All Saints, then. Saints in Heaven. The realm of pure, white satin robes, gold halos, harps hanging on willow branches. Endless boredom. According to Mark Twain, at least. I have not been there yet, only peeked inside a couple of times. Looked and forgot what I saw.  We are not saints. Not yet.

Green shone the wings

of the dove - the Psalm says

with erudite certainty

that I don’t share

touched - as I am -

by an angel

of forgetfulness

and inattention.

______________________________________

Photos (C) 2011-2013 by Maja Trochimczyk

Poetry (c) 1997-2013 by Maja Trochimczyk