I Sing the Song of Maczkowce

I sing the song of Maczkowce

Which was born and died in struggle

No great city like London

A tiny settlement

No claim to greatness

Never the birthplace of an Einstein or Chopin

Just normal folk, young couples, young children

Unremarkable, not worth remembering

You may think.

I sing the song of Maczkowce

Of its birth, its heroic effort

Its grasping, desperate strangled end

Which no one wants to know about

Not a historic crime like Birkenau

Just a minor desecration

Run of the mill in its way

Never worthy of a place in your heart

Or in the text books of your schools

Just a hundred or so villagers

Taken to Siberia as was the way in those days

I sign the song of Maczkowce

Damn it. It deserves to be sung.

Why should my father’s village

Not be counted in the annals

Of the human tragedies that matter?

I sing the song

Even if I sing it to only myself.

I am not deaf to the destruction of my father’s mother

Or her neighbours, or the children who perished

It does not need to be Auschwitz to be fixed in your brain forever.

The resting places of the citizens of Maczkowce

In Tehran, Kazakhstan, Berlin

Are the source of the pain in your heart

So I sing this song, your song

The song of your loss

The song of your forgetfulness

To remind you

To tell you

Of Maczkowce

Eradicated from the map

But not from our collective consciousness

I sing the song of the immortality of Maczkowce.

Dad wants water

Dad wants water. It's 4am

In his adjustable bed

he calls to Mum

in a clear

authoritarian voice with just a hint of fear

thick with Poland

“I want water”

He is in Kermine burning typhus

in Tehran dancing with malaria

in Basra, body on fire, in the twentieth year of his existence

Splashed on his clothes and sick body

the water soothes his fevered refugee frame

Mum wearily brings him water.

In the morning she’ll wash his damp-smelling duvet cover

On the 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz 27 January 2005

Would my grandfather have been sent there
I wondered through tears
If they had found him
Or would he have ended up amongst the corpses
In Katyn Forest?

Maybe that would have been more fitting
Than death by shattered heart
Broken by his family’s deportation
And he alone, relatively safe
Near Nazi-occupied Kracow.

The world’s pain is Poland
The world’s hope
Lies in the hearts of little children
Hearing the words
Auschwitz, never forget

Haunting pleas from near-dead
Survivors, desperate now
They know their time is come
Never forget, they tug
At my sleeve
Through the tv screen
Never forget.
And learn

A burden then
I of the generation that followed
To teach my two happy kids
Of madness unleashed
Of my own father’s wounds
And how my distant heart aches
For a grandmother’s hug
That was never to come
Of Poland’s spilled blood
And Judaism’s woe

On Polish soil, the land
That is in my two sweet children
Deep inside
Though they feel only Scots,
And nothing in them feels Slavic
But the time will come
Perhaps
When that tidal wave
Of historic pain washes over their lives
And they’ll feel it

As I did, gradually, softly
Till my consciousness
Changed till I was filled
With the pain and torment,
If not the guts or the pride
Of that most beguiling
Of human concepts,
Poland

Where these sixty years passed
Have scarcely dried the blood
Of the lambs of God
The Jewish sacrifice, the evil days,
The Romanis,
The Poles, and the whole of European civilisation
Which was washed away in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Oh Anna Akhmatova how I cry for you

 Oh Anna Akhmatova how I cry for you
Whose words emblazon pain deep within my heart
Whose love and life decry all our efforts
And who survived the years of wanton abuse.

Oh Anna Gorenko who could not even use your own name
I say it loudly now, though there’s no-one to hear it
Whose wild utterances of the Russian pain
Weaved their way through monstrous locks and chains.

Oh Anna, dear Anna, your crimson heart
Bled proudly in secret conspiracy
To let the world read of the grasp of the real
But we are illiterate here, we do not read you

Oh Anna Akhmatova Russia’s finest flower
Blooming brightly in tired clothes with haggard face
Fighting demons in your mind, in your bed, in your land
Conquering all through suffering, thank you for your world.

In response to "the unknown grave"

I know it now
it has a number
on a letter
written to me
by the Polish consul in Tehran

a number and a row
in a named suburb

and a confirmation of the date of her death
25th October 1942

no longer the unknown grave
some day no longer the unvisited grave
one day red and white roses
will be laid upon Janina's place of rest
by the children of her children

why are you crying young man?

"why are you crying young man?"
asked an old lady of a young Polish airman
as together they watched
the Victory Parade proceed down the Mall.

betrayed

abandoned

bereft

my father, by the time he was twenty four
had lost his mother
his father
his home;
his part of Poland was annexed into the Soviet Union
and the rest of Poland was occupied
by the people who had ethnically cleansed his family to Siberia
leading to his mother's death from starvation

Why are we crying, no longer young men or women
seven decades later
the children
or the children of the children?

history has airbrushed our parents and grandparents
from the list of the victims of war
just as the Poles were wiped from the Victory Parade of 1946

we will not suffer the invisibility
of our loved ones' despair

we will not accept the non-existence
of their epic odyssey
that is our astonishing heritage

Kresy-Siberia will be remembered

Apology

you I don't know but could
if I tried but won't
life has its unacceptable choices
a night watching telly
or a visit to a dying relative

too far
too late
too ready excuses

your epic love
sits stock still in some half-abandoned
care home

and I the potential saviour
postpone and procrastinate
while your memory
serves up magnificat Mary
Janina on the cross
Janka martyred with holy communion

Hamilton is a long way from salvation