May 3, Polish Constitution Day

 May 3, Polish Constitution Day

May 3rd was always a big holiday for us when I was growing up in the Polish Triangle in Chicago in the 1950s.  There were parades and parties and my parents and their friends singing the old songs they sang in Poland, the songs of hope and Polish honor and the beauty of the trees and fields beneath the Polish sky.  

This is a poem I wrote to commemorate that day.   It's in my book about my parents and the war, Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

Poland 

They’ll never see it again, these old Poles 

with their dreams of Poland.  My father 

told me when I was a boy that those who tried 

in ‘45 were turned back at the borders 

by shoeless Russians dressed in rags and riding 

shaggy ponies.  The Poles fled through the woods,

the unlucky ones left behind, dead 

or what’s worse wounded, the lucky ones

gone back to wait in the old barracks 

in the concentration and labor camps

in Gatersleben or Wildflecken

for some miracle that would return them 

to Poznan or Katowice.  But the world

wasn’t listening or its hands were busy 

somewhere else.  Later, in America

these Poles gathered with their brothers

and with their precious sons and daughters

every May 3, Polish Constitution Day, 

to pray for the flag.  There was no question 

then what the colors stood for, red for all 

that bleeding sorrow, white for innocence.

And always the old songs telling the world 

Poland would never fall so long as poppies 

flower red, and flesh can conquer rock or steel.