Krystyna Dąbrowska

trans. by Mira Rosenthal

White Plastic Chairs

Let the everyday in poetry be like these white plastic
chairs below the Wailing Wall.
For it is there, not on some ornate wingback,
that old rabbis pray,
touching their foreheads to stone.
Ordinary plastic chairs—
women and men climb on
to see each other over the partition that divides them.
And the mother of the boy who is having his bar mitzvah
stands on the chair and showers candy
on the son as he says farewell to childhood.
Let the everyday in poetry be like such chairs—
they disappear in order to make room
for the dance circle on Sabbath night. 

Krystyna Dąbrowska is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ścieżki dźwiękowe (Soundtracks, 2018), and the winner of two of the most prestigious Polish literary prizes: the Wisława Szymborska Award and the Kościelski Prize. Her poems have been translated into numerous languages and anthologized widely. English translations of her work have appeared recently in Ploughshares, Harpers, The Los Angeles Review, The Threepenny Review, Tupelo Quarterly, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Poet and translator Mira Rosenthal is a past NEA and Stegner fellow, and her work appears in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Guernica, Harvard Review, Oxford American, and A Public Space. Her first book of poems, The Local World (Kent State, 2011), received the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, and residencies at Hedgebrook and The MacDowell Colony. She teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Cal Poly State University. www.mirarosenthal.com.