Pisanki

Zosia Kuczyńska, Rachel Piercey

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781910139714
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczy?ska. As Kuczy?ska's poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person's story without exploiting it? What's at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczy?ska's poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from 'the heat of Easter in Tehran' to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.

Brother Staś

I.

Between Drohiczyn and Tehran

is Arkhangelsk and, of course, the train.

It is nineteen forty-two.

Your parents’ graves are smaller

than telegraph poles and as indistinct

from other parents’ graves

as telegraph poles from telegraph poles

or breadcrumbs from breadcrumbs.

When you cross the Caspian Sea

to Pahlavi and Tehran,

your sister and brother

do not succumb to typhoid.

As for me I find, in fever dreams, the body

takes on qualities of darkened rooms,

all grain and grit and endless motes,

the white noise of scattered gravel

on woodland paths clever with brothers

who know the way back home.

And indeed it must have seemed

as though you were a stone

when you woke, an only child among lost children

so left behind that the backs of their sisters

and brothers moving on from sickness

were fantasies opulent as gingerbread houses.

II.

Unadorned for the miraculous,

a boiled egg cools to the heat of Easter in Tehran.

It is nineteen forty-two.

Hunger and convalescence have made you slight:

you juggle and peel,

and with the heatproof teeth of a fire-eater

reveal the improbable marigold

of a new life bashful with his acts of kindness;

you step from the crawling tent into the heart

of a white-hot day in which your brother,

unadorned for the miraculous,

appears.

III.

Between Tehran and Marigold Street

is Valivade and, of course, the sea.

HMT Asturias is, apparently,

a woman just like you,

and can no more imagine her final days

as RMS Titanic

in the film A Night to Remember

than you can imagine your brother

leaving England for New England,

or your brother flying home

to Marigold Street, the family saint,

growing another heart in his old man’s head.

It is nineteen forty-eight.

You are yet to fall in love

with cups of tea;

when your daughter comes

to redefine him, he will give

your English neighbours rationed leaves

for powdered egg; he will become

an uncle the way a ship survives

its maiden voyage only to be repurposed,

flooded and abandoned

and refitted as the ship that brought you

to your second home.

Fellow Traveller 2

Laika, little lemon, little bug,

we should not have done it—we can say that, now.

Your death was unjustified: we did not learn

enough; one summer’s day might have achieved

as much, one sunstruck car with the windows shut.

Dresses

It is time to launder dresses in Valivade;

a white-blonde, freckled orphan is playing mother

to a young girl old enough to be her sister.

One girl will wash the other’s only dress

while the other waits, a nude Coppélia,

as like a child as a mannequin.

Irena gathers her limbs like kindling, perched

on the handlebars of a push-bike, dolly-light,

a cotton vulture knotted in her hair,

a matching dress sewn fast to the shape of the day

Marysia learned to make dresses in Valivade.

Tidiness

When I came to the sea I was clean as a sheet,

and, unsurprisingly, I had to swim

for miles before the smell of pink

and feathers left my fingertips for goo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Emma Press
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• The train from Arkhangelsk to Bukhara
• Brother Staś
• Fellow Traveller 2
• Dresses
• Tidiness
• Vection
• Pink Postwar
• Wesela (belonging to the wedding)
• Sarah Jane’s Geranium
• 土 (Earth)
• Rochdale Nativity
• Untied
• Wycinanki (papercuts)
• Perdix (the partridge)
• Lagan
• Joy, in memoriam
• Pyriform
• Vespertiliones
• Medico della Peste
• On Hosiery
• General note
• Further notes
• Acknowledgements