Eye Contact with the Dead

Eye Contact with the Dead

Don’t make eye contact
with the dead in their coffins.
They’ve suffered long enough,
walked too long upon the earth,

smelled its sweet air in the morning,
loved the people they’ve loved,
loved you as much as they could,
probably more than you guessed.

Now, it’s time to look away.
You don’t need to see their eyes
on you as you turn away,
their eyes watching as long

as they can, watching until
you turn into your own grave.

______

An audio of me reading this appears at 2River

http://www.2river.org/2RView/17_4/poems/guzlowski.html
.

Dead Deer in the Backyard

Dead Deer in the Backyard

I found a deer in the backyard today.  It was dead.

I had gone out to mow the back terrace, a section of the yard that slopes down to the next street, and there was this deer there.  I don't know if it was male or female, or how old it was.

There were lots of flies around its head, especially around its eyes.  I think the flies were trying to get to whatever moisture was still there in the deer's eyes.  I don't kow for sure.

It wasn't that big, but I didn't know how I was going to move it out of there.  For a moment, I thought about just covering it with leaves and letting it rot down there.  It was far enough from the house, and Linda and I didn't go down much to that part of the yard.

But then I thought I couldn't that.  Linda's parents are coming later this week for a visit, and I bet they would want to walk around the backyard.  The terraces there are beautiful.  They are handmade, boarded by stone, and flowers whose names I don't know are everywhere.

So I knew I had to get the deer out of there.  I grabbed its front legs and pulled it.  It wasn't big but even a small deer weighs enough to slow a guy down, and I just turned 69.  I got it up half way to the first of the three terraces, and I knew I couldn't drag it any further.  I was covered with sweat by then, and the flies buzzing around the deer were all around me too.

So I walked to the shed up by the house, and I got the wheelbarrow and brought it down.  It wasn't easy getting the deer in the wheelbarrow.  Dead weight.  You know what that means.

It was slow work but I managed it.  I pushed the thing up the slope, up the terraces with their beautiful flowers.

It wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard either.  The wheelbarrow was sort of balanced.  The deer was small but it filled that wheelbarrow.  The head and most of the neck, the front legs and the back legs -- all of that was outside, balancing the wheelbarrow so even an old man could push the thing and the dead deer in it up a slope to the street.

What did I think about as I pushed the thing up the hill?

Stupid things.

About Prometheus.

About Bill Stafford's poem about finding a dead deer on a road at night.  About how the hell he was able to drag that deer off to the side of the road so nobody would run into it.

About another poem, William Carlos Williams' poem about how so much depends upon a wheelbarrow.

Stupid things.

Why did I think about them?

I thought about them, so I wouldn't have to think about this dead deer in my backyard and how she died and whether her dying would touch any one except me.

My Father Before the War

Before the war, my father imagined that he would always live in Poland according to the seasons and the holy days that came regularly like the ringing of church bells from the steeple of the small church in the village nearby.

A good Catholic boy, he loved going to the church on Holy Saturday to have the eggs and butter, the salt and bread blessed by the priest.

My father loved going early to church on Easter Sunday too, leaving the farm in the wagon even before the sun was a pink silence over the east, and coming to the church where the little girls stood in their white dresses holding lilies while the boys seemed serious and awkward in their older brothers’ suits.

And there was May Day when they pledged themselves to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and then Pentecost when he imagined the tongues burning above the heads of the apostles, and Christmas with its mysterious midnight mass that began in darkness and ended in light, and the feast of the three kings and more.

My father imagined that this would always be the life he lived.

________

To read more about my mom and dad, please consider buying a copy of Echoes of Tattered Tongues

Welcome to America

Welcome to America

I came here as a refugee in 1951. My first 3 years were spent in a refugee camp in Germany. My parents were put in the camp right after the war in 1945 -- after years in the German slave labor camps.

I don't have many memories of being in the refugee camps. My mom told me that one of my big fears was being separated from her. I needed to be with her all the time. One of my strongest memories in fact is discovering myself in a field next to our barracks building without my mom or dad near. I was weeping and angry and lost.

My parents heard me crying.

They had been talking to some other refugees in a building next to ours. They ran out and picked me and told to not to worry, they would never leave me.


.

My Mother and the Wolves

My mother grew up in a forest in Eastern Poland in the 1920s and 30s. She could hear wolves howling in the winter, and she listened to her mother's stories and warnings and passed them on to me.

This is a poem about the stories my grandmother told my mom.

My Mother and the Wolves

In their log house in the forests

west of Lwow, my grandmother

told my mother tales in the winter

to pry her thoughts from the sound

of trees splitting with the cold,

exploding with a crack like that

of her father's double-barreled shotgun

A cat, she would say, can't be trusted.

It comes in the short spring night

and sleeps on the priest's chest

watching his adam's apple

as if it were some mouse hidden

under a blanket of stubbled skin

and then striking its sudden claws

through his skin into cartilage

And what of the wolves, she'd ask,

the nine wolves that in the winter's

grey stone dawn would smash

their bones against the door,

hammering like hungry seals

until the door splinters and the baby

is got at – even from the cradle

even from its precious sleep?

And listen, Tekla, my mother's mother

would whisper then, there are men

as bad as wolves that no door

– no matter how solid the oak –

will keep out.

So trust in Jesus

in the world of clouds far beyond

the frozen forests of this frozen world

Do this always, and fear the greedy hens.

_________________________

In 1942, my grandmother was shot to death by German soldiers.  They also killed my aunt and her infant daughter.   My mom was taken to Germany where she was a slave laborer  for almost three years.

I write about my mom and her experiences in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.   Here's an amazon link to the book.  Just click here.

The picture above is of my mom, my sister Donna and me, in an amusement park in Chicago in the mid 1950s.

Father's Day 2018

My father grew up in poverty, an orphan working on a farm in Poland.  When he was 20, he was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany where he spent 5 years as a slave laborer.  

He used to joke that Buchenwald was his high school and his university.  In fact, he didn't have much education at all, could barely read and write. 

But he had faith, a faith that in some ways I believe was strengthened by the years he spent in a concentration camp.

This is a piece about what he believed. 


What My Father Believed

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages

or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder

or gathering at the beautiful river

that flows beneath the throne of God.

He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism

either, and didn’t know the purpose of life

was to love and honor and serve God.

He‘d been to the village church as a boy

in Poland, and knew he was Catholic

because his mother and father were buried

in a cemetery under wooden crosses.

His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took

to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,

and cried.  She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried

until she died there, died of a broken heart.

She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God

and religion came from the sermons

the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up

with his own life.  He knew living was hard,

and that even children are meant to suffer. 

Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,

“Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?”

My father believed we are here to lift logs

that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails

so bent they crack when we hit them.

In the slave labor camps in Germany,

He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should

help each other.  If you see someone

on a cross, his weight pulling him down

and breaking his muscles, you should try

to lift him, even if only for a minute,

even though you know lifting won’t save him.

_____

This piece and other prose and poetry pieces about my dad and my mom appear in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available at Amazon.  Just click here.

The Liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, April 11, 1945

On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated Buchnewald Concentration Camp.  It was a large camp housing about 80,000 prisoners, Poles, Slovenians, Frenchmen, Africans, and others.  They were brought there to work in the factories that the Germans built in and around the camp. 

We have a lot of documentation and photos from this liberation because the great American journalist and photographer Margaret Bourke-White was with the US Army when they liberated this camp.  She took photographs that captured the suffering of the men who were in the camp.

Here’s one of her photos.

My father was a prisoner in this camp for four years.  He was just a Polish farm boy, and he was captured when he went into his village to buy a piece of rope one Saturday.  The Germans had surrounded the village and were rounding up men and boys to go to Buchenwald and work in the factories there.

A lot of times when we think of Concentration Camps we imagine the death camps the Germans built in Poland where the primary business was killing large numbers of civilians.  Buchenwald wasn’t a death camp.  Millions did not die there, burned in the ovens, their ashes scattered in ponds where the water is still gray 70 years later.  But they did die there.  About one out four people died each year. 

What did they die of in Buchenwald?

Mainly starvation.  Fifty years later, my dad could still remember the hunger he felt.  He did hard labor 6 and even 7 days a week, 12 and 14 hour days, on a handful of food a day.  I’ve read accounts of what the men ate.  It came to about 600 calories a day. How much is that?  A Big Mac with Cheese is about 700 calories.  A Big Mac without cheese is 600.  But what my dad ate wasn’t a Big Mac.

I asked my dad once how he was able to stay alive.  He shrugged and said he didn’t know.  He said that most of the time the guards gave them a kind of gray gruel made out of some kind of grain and animal bones.  My dad called it “Hitler’s secret weapon.”  It wasn’t enough to keep a man alive, so my dad was always looking for things to stick into his mouth: twigs, pieces of paper, bits of cloth, leather buttons.  Once when he complained about the food, a guard hit him across his head with a club.  He knocked my dad down to the ground, but my dad got up and begged for food.  It was the wrong thing to say.  The guard clubbed my dad unconscious.  When my dad awoke, he was blind in one eye. 

But men didn’t only die of hunger.  People died for simple infractions, annoying the guards by urinating out of turn, slouching in line, standing in the wrong place. 

They died of cruelty too.  My father told me a story about one cold January night when the 400 men in his barracks were called out into the square for a roll call.  The men were dressed in rags, torn pants and shirts.  Some had shoes, others didn’t.  They had almost no protection from the snow and wind.  The guards lined them up in rows and told them they had to check the roster of prisoners, and then the Germans started reading the long lists of names.  As the guards read, men started dropping into the snow, falling to their knees and then keeling over.  And the guards kept reading.  They read through the roster once and then they said, “Oops, we missed a name,” and then they read through the roster again and again and again for six hours while men fell to their knees and died in the snow.  The next morning garbage carts came and collected the dead and took them to the ovens.  

Others died from overwork, hangings, experiments, crucifixions.  One of my father’s friends, an artist from Wilno, was first castrated and then hanged. 

One in every four died like this.  A lot of Margaret Bourke-White’s photos are of the dead, in piles like worthless paper, like rubbish.

But there are also many pictures of those who survived.

And when I look at the photos Margaret Bourke-White took the day the camp was liberated, I look for the face of my dad.  Thin as a shoelace, blind in one eye, with a scar across his skull where the guard beat him and beat him and beat him.  I haven’t found my dad yet, but I know I’ll recognize him when I see him.  

In the Spring the War Ended

For a long time the war was not in the camps.

My father worked in the fields and listened

to the wind moving the grain, or a guard

shouting a command far off, or a man dying.

But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling

whisper of American planes, so high, like

angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder

even God in Heaven would have to listen to.

At last, one spring day he knew the war was there.

In the door of the barracks stood a soldier,

an American, short like a boy and frightened,

and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth

and took his hands and embraced him and told him

he loved him and his mother and father,

and he would pray for all his children

and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.

__________________________________________

The photo above was taken by Margaret Bourke-White.

If you want to know more about my dad and his experiences in the war, you can get a copy of my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available at Amazon.  Echoes contains the chapbook Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, about my dad's experiences in that camp.