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in my native language, but that time I managed to gather enough energy
to say something briefly which, if a little incoherent, at least had the
force of conviction.
Several days later, I bumped into a woman friend on the street, a
Polish emigre my age, who had been at the demonstration. She con–
gratulated me on my speech and added, "And that poem of yours - that
was very nice, too. I hadn't realized you had so much fire in your belly."
I was puzzled. "What do you mean, a poem?" I asked. My speech
had been delivered in prose. Could she mean that some of it had been so
flowery that it sounded like verse? Then, I suddenly understood what she
was talking about. If I have ever been close to fainting, it was at that
moment. What had happened at the demonstration was this: just after
the end of my speech, an anonymous young man popped out from the
surrounding crowd, interrupted the master of ceremonies, seized the
mi–
crophone, and read aloud, with gusto and dramatic effects, a long poem
that was apparently the product of his own very recent inspiration - it
was written on a thick wad of paper restaurant napkins. No one, in–
cluding myself, dared interrupt him. He looked like someone who would
not be above kicking and screaming. Besides , during a demonstration
against totalitarian oppressors, it would have looked terribly
antidemocratic to suppress an act of free speech. So he continued to read
his poem,
crescendo,
up to the final
jorfejorfissimo.
Translated, it went
something like this: "Oh, bloody General, your hands with blood do
drip,! Whilst Poland, our beloved mother, you hold in your iron grip!"
On second thought, this version might be closer to the unforgettable
quality of the original: "Oh, bloody General, your hands with blood are
dripping,! Whilst Poland, our beloved mother, moans and groans as you
her entrails are ripping."
No doubt, my woman friend had been too far away to see that it
was not I who was reciting the poem. Still, I was flabbergasted . The
thought that my friend could suspect me of writing such stuff was not as
unsettling as the fact that such stuff was precisely what she, an educated,
moderately intelligent, and fairly well-read representative of my genera–
tion, wished and expected to hear from the mouth of a contemporary
poet. She and I were both exiles. The political situation in the country
we had both left was tragic. People were being killed, hopes extin–
guished. I was a poet. She was my audience. It seemed natural to her that
I would write about General Jaruzelski's hands dripping with blood and
call Poland "our beloved mother," even if I did it with atrocious rhymes.
She expected nothing else. I was and I was not expected to be myself, a
poet. That is, my audience expected me to put words together in a way
that they thought would please them more than a newspaper article. Yet
a newspaper article, sprinkled with a couple of noble-sounding
