The works of mine brought together in this collection come, in the main, from the years 1928 – 1935. Some of them have appeared in literary periodicals and journals — and one of the poems was even published, in its own good time, in the Cracovian Switch.
I take the opportunity here of confessing that, ever since that day when certain epigones of ‘Young Poland,’ conservatists and destroyers of ‘poetic novelty,’ sought to exterminate Polish futurism and formism (so fraught with significance for our most recent poetry, and non-poetry as well), I have decided to blaze my own trails in verse.
Our poetic ‘avant-garde,’ which would so like to distance itself from Polish futurism and so desires to relegate the latter’s significance to silence, fortunately (in its works) is still under the influence of Nife in the Stummik, Bruno Jesieński’s Szela, St. Młodożeniec’s Lines and Futuretimes and my own Green Eye and Robespierre. All the better for them. — They have, at present, ‘free range.’ The range that we, the futurists, fought to obtain some fifteen years ago.
Lajkonik
It was five o’clock in the afternoon
The hejnał was just bugled out
From St Mary’s higher tower
The hejnał melody — a flood of trumpets
Which spread wide on all hands:
Glasses, and half-filled cups
Of coffee and tea
In the Sukiennice café,
Flowers in the flower-venders’ pots
Set in rows over the cobblestones
Gillyflowers lilies and mums
Filled to the brim with the hejnał.
Above the Square above the Sukiennice
Angels
Two, female, in long white dresses
Soared, their wings humming like the summer breeze
And the harvester at rest beneath the trees
Harvests the thoughts of men
His heart — a poet.
And when the hejnał was cut off — then bells
Those friends of lonely people
Took voice from all the
Churches:
As from a radio station switched on
Bum bam — bum bam,
And all the thoughts of all the people there
Down on the Square, tangled
Thoughts flapped about the Square
Like birds — like white
Petals of flowers — like pigeons
White angels of birds.
On ulica Franciszkańska
Across from the rosy church
Of the ...