Marek Pelc – A Polish-Jewish poet in Frankfurt/Main

Marek Pelc
 

I live in a foreign city
and am surprised that the roads
seem so familiar, that the light from the streetlamps
shines on the paving - like yesterday
like a week ago. Today, I walked
again across the iron bridge
to the other side of the Main.
Thereafter, an invisible net enveloped me
of unclear memories -
Bridges over the river in my hometown.

The palpable reality of a foreign city is
always painful. Early in the morning, for example,
you buy a loaf of rye bread in the bakery around the corner
count the money in a foreign language
but still clearly feel the dormant sounds
of another within you.

How long - you ask - can you
live in a foreign city without
allowing it to break into your soul?
How long can you look into faces
and hear the babble of voices on the street
without feeling that it is a part of you?

And yet, this is a foreign city
you sense it, and yet you cannot explain it -
perhaps because there is nowhere
where you are at home.

Because home is not a place
but only a grievance of the soul.
 

From the volume of poetry “Czarnowidzenia”, Paris 2015 – translated from the Polish/German by the translator.

 

***
 

again we are together 
in Jerusalem
I hold you
in open arms
without doubts
that it is possible
(in dreams, everything is possible)

in the morning
I open the iron window shutters
the cats are already warming themselves
in the sun near the refuse bins
a young tree trembles lightly in the wind
the outline of the walled slope
opposite the house
and on the wall
the plant, finger-like, winds its way
known here as
“Wandering Jew”

10 February 1987
 

From the anthology “Napisane w Niemczech. Geschrieben in Deutschland“, Jestetten 2000 – translated from the Polish/German by the translator.