A Letter to My Mother from Poland, October 4, 1952



John Guzlowski



Dearest Tekla, my only sister,



The war has been over for so long but still we suffer the leavings of war. We have tables but no food, pain but no medicine, strong metal beds but no straw to sleep on.


Each day I wait for night to free me from the longing, but it only brings me dreams of our dead mother crying about the wash, blaming me for the dresses I can't get clean.

I hold them above the tub but haven't the strength to lower them into the water.

Sometimes, I see her standing in the doorway looking east toward the autumn forest

where snow already falls. Perhaps if you could come back to Poland and travel back

to the village with me, maybe we could find the grave where they dropped her and Genja and Genja's baby. Someone there must know where they are buried. Maybe then mother would stop coming to me.


If you could come in the spring, perhaps you could bring me a bolt of blue cloth, blue with little white flowers. You know the kind we wore the year before the war. A new dress for summer would be so nice.



Your loving sister,



Sophia

*****



Letter to Family in Poland: Undeliverable



Christina Pacosz




I live on a peninsula on a peninsula, about a hundred miles from the ocean and the westernmost edge of the United States, not in-cluding Alaska. I see by the map you are land-locked, far from the seaports of Gdynia and Gdansk.


Here I wake to the smell of kelp, tart and ripe. The past few days the sun arrives muffled in a hard frost and crows call from the tops of telephone poles. Early afternoon and gulls float above the house, playing in the wind. Sometimes, in the evening, after the sun falls behind the Olympics, but before true night, great blue heron beat large wings, heading west.


There are no storks here; my bird book describes them as an Old World species. Your world, the world my father remembers from fifty years ago. I read a National Geographic recently about how the storks are in trouble. Do you ever find yourself wondering what isn't?


How is the weather? In the letter that did reach us last July, Ciotka mentions floods in March and destruction of crops. We read her meager news over and over, an artifact, a clue, at last. The envelope arrived opened.


I am afraid to write what I think because I don't know what is safe and what isn't. I pick my way through letters in my mind, and feel like I am walking on old snow, high up the mountain and rotten with spring.


Do you have food stored for the winter? Root cellars filled with potatoes and onions, both red and white? Are there crocks of kapusta and links of kielbasa hanging, or do you wait in line for meat, if there is any? Did someone wake one morning and gather grzyby under a blue sky, drying on racks near the stove even as I write these words you will probably never see?


I want to tell you I love you, but you are question marks. After almost a year in jail, Walesa said: I must be careful. I need time to think.


I agree with him, but oh how I want to abandon myself and walk the minefield to your hearts. Sentiment is a luxury if it could be used against you.


All my life I have been leaning in your direction, prowling the district between Janow and Sandomierz. You are south of Lublin, not far from Galicia, one hundred miles or so west of Czes-tochowa, settled and living in the San River valley. I know where you are, but not how to get there. Saying the names is some comfort, but not enough.


I remember the childhood years of letters in a foreign script, incomprehensible. His answer: packages of sensible underwear, warm socks, nylons, lipstick, canned food, antibiotics. He’d whistle as he worked and box everything just so. When he was finished he'd pull a white flour sack around the package, drawing the rough cloth tight as skin. Then he would take needle and thread and carefully sew the sacking taut.


With hands crabbed and stiff and half a finger missing, he'd bring out a bottle of black ink saved just for this purpose, dip the nib of the lettering pen and print your address, black on white, each letter costing him more than I knew.


I realize I am writing more about him than me, but his love was a vast bridge between your sky and mine. What can I say? I am a woman, a writer, middle-aged as they say here, and I love you. Autumn with its startle of leaves is almost finished and the world, yours and mine, moves into winter.


When you pass the oplatek at the darkest time of the year, I will be thinking of

you.




*****



grzyby - mushrooms

kapusta - sauerkraut

Ciotka - aunt

oplatek - Christmas wafer of unleavened bread, ritually shared by family and friends during the holiday



Dalmo'ma broadside - early 1980's