Category: poetry

Here are my poems in English and Polish.

Crayon drawing showing a beautiful young red-haired woman with freckles

All I wanted

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

When I was young, I wanted to be bold again and again
and write a verse, or better yet, a song.

When I was young, I wanted to hear your giggle
as we switched the dust jackets of Walt Whitman’s books
to pass them off as Jackie Collins’.

When I was young, I wanted to name all the constellations
that illuminate your face so that no one ever again would dare to say
they’re just freckles.

When I was young, I wanted to build a house out of the finger strokes
on the keys of your piano and my typewriter, so we could furnish it
with the gentle brushes of fingertips over lips.

When I was young, I wanted to believe we would never end up
among the Kramers, Hillards, and the like.

An oil painting showing a man looking thoughtfully at the sea

To stay determined to breathe

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Who is to judge if I’m wasting my life?
As far as nature is concerned,
I have already fulfilled my sole purpose
by passing on my genes.
Now all that’s left is to sustain my body
to the very end, whenever that may be.
All the rest is fodder that I convinced myself
I needed to stay determined to breathe:
buy a book, read a book, go to the beach,
tell someone you wish you loved them
no more.

A watercolour painting showing a middle-aged man standing in his bedroom

What’s left to fiddle-faddle with?

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

So, here I am, turning quinquagenarian soon—no longer young, but not quite old yet either.
I decided to change something in my life, and since great things start small, or so they say,
I changed a detail—my briefs for boxers. I also spotted a tiny hole in the heel of the sock
I wore this morning, and for a brief moment, I weighed the pros and cons of darning it
or throwing it away, which is odd because I never paid much attention to my garment before,
so what difference does it make now that we parted ways?

A watercolour painting showing a man with an umbrella on a promenade in the evening, standing away from a woman sitting on a bench.

A lesson in passing time

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

It doesn’t matter that I read everything from Plato to Dostoyevsky
to Faludi and Greer, that I can write complex algorithms as well
as the occasional stanza or two, and that I know the difference
between epistemology and epistolography. To you, I’m just a bore.
At least we didn’t need to extend our only date beyond the length
of the promenade, and your blunt assessment quickly cured me
of online dating.

A watercolour picture showing a group of dancing ballerinas

Nothing more than oddly arranged words

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I don’t get ballet,
or more generally, dance.

As a man of words myself, I see bookshops as chapels
and libraries as cathedrals,
yet both maintain the intimate comfort of my boudoir.
You get the picture.

The same applies to the visual arts.
I still have vivid memories of long discussions with my friend
about painting—for her, it ended with impressionism,
while for me, impressionism began the real deal.

And I will not even mention music—one of the loves of my life.
After all, even deaf people enjoy it,
perceiving the sound as vibrations through the body.
‘Hearing is basically a specialised form of touch.’

Then, what’s my problem with dance—ballet specifically, you ask?
Well, to me, it’s nothing but some bizarre physical exercise,
and while I can appreciate the aesthetics of whirling dervishes,
I see them more as moving statues, if anything.

But what do I know? If you think about it, you could say that a poem
is nothing more than oddly arranged words.

A surreal watercolour painting showing a man having breakfast

A bland diet for now

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I’ve watched very many films—very bad ones—for a single line only,
and I’m gradually realising how these one-liners pave my sense of artificiality.
But I’ll be all right, I guess. It’s not like we stop making dinners
just because we burn our fingers once or twice.
For now, though, I think I’ll stick to silent cinema.
Who knows, maybe it will be like those avocado sandwiches
and chamomile tea that you first eat to soothe an upset stomach,
but after a while, they simply become your regular breakfast.

The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond.

Random thoughts swirling through the poet’s mind after waking up

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

For millennia, people thought
that the sun revolved around the earth,
and it took a great deal of ingenuity,
pursued by burning at the stake,
to mentally set foot on the former,
or rather beyond both celestial bodies.
And yet we still have ardent flat-earthers among us.

After only a few miles on the bike,
a well-oxygenated brain may absorb a fair dose
of Wittgenstein or decide to leave the typical nine-to-five
for something more exotic, like a snake milker,
a ravenmaster, or a professional mourner.
If you are particularly lucky, you might even land your dream job
as an eternal employee, although that would require moving
to Gothenburg in Sweden.

My father used to say, ‘Ordnung muss sein,’
so that I would know that bending over a stool
and counting aloud the blows with his army belt
was for my future good;
otherwise, I could mistake it for an act of cruelty.
I wonder what his views would be
if he lived to see today, when even a light smack
is a criminal offence.

A surreal watercolor painting showing a half-angelic figure flying out of a room in the clouds and a man with a hat sitting thoughtfully on a stool

French breakfasts

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

You know it’s time to leave when every breakfast becomes an act
of desperation, and yet you prolong this little la-la land in denial
as if a stuffed croissant with café au lait were the epitome of certainty.

Didn’t you admit long ago that someone else had already spared you
from the hell of paradise? Knowing you, I doubt you have any desire
to answer. If anything, you’d pretend there was no question asked.

And there is still the unrewarding experience of returning home,
which sounds a bit melodramatic, even for someone like you,
but if you wanted to, it could simply be reduced to a logistics problem.

After all, a broken heart can’t find solace in complaining about cold feet.