Tag: poem

watercolour portrait of a bored young woman

Actively bored

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

You will never see the peculiarities
of your own language
or really appreciate its beauty
until you learn another one.

Only after emigrating,
while delving into the intricacies of English,
did I notice that in my mother tongue
there is a construction that is contrary
to the principles of logic.

The negative concord was quite a surprise,
and once I saw it, I was baffled at
how something so obvious
had escaped my notice
for almost three decades.

On the other hand, if I think of diminutives,
English is not even remotely close
to what one can achieve in Polish.

And if the doldrums struck,
in my native language, you could say I’m bored
but also express that in a more active,
if untranslatable, form.

stack of letters of the Latin alphabet

Let’s say—future

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Imagine a simple word—let’s say—future, spoken as if it were native
to my mother tongue. It would sound something akin to foo-too-re,
with the last e pronounced as in the verb get. It sounds rather ridiculous,
doesn’t it? Perhaps this will allow you to be in my shoes for a moment,
so you know my feelings when I hear you say my name like it’s English.
It may be hard to believe, but the letters of the most widely used script,
the Latin alphabet, do not necessarily represent the same sounds
as in the current lingua franca.

young woman lying among scraps of paper with notes

Time does not need a notebook

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

My notes are full of random phrases,
thoughts cut off mid-sentence,
now devoid of context,
phone numbers that no longer matter,
and hard-to-decipher scribbles
that were probably meant to represent something.
Quite a patchwork, needless to say,
but still the best capture
of my dishevelled life at hand.
And to add an extra splash of colour to it,
I don’t even have a proper notebook;
it’s all on scraps of paper,
on the backs of receipts and tickets
that pile up in an old Christmas basket,
with time playing Secret Santa.

watercolour with a person leaving the bedroom

The connoisseur

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

It takes a while to finish all the morning routines
before opening the curtains, which inevitably marks
the beginning of a new day, but once you accept
that waking up hurts, you can always find some solace
in the opening 4’33”, and then all you have to do
is pass through the bedroom door for another barefoot
pilgrimage to the shoe rack full of pairs of Louis Vuitton,
as genuine as Vermeer’s The Supper at Emmaus,
your favourite.

watercolour with a man paying with a credit card

The lost caress of dosh

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Practicality aside, there is a certain beauty to the old imperial coinage.
All those sovereigns and crowns and their halves, guineas, shillings,
and farthings—not to mention bobs, coppers, or tanners—are pure poetry
marked with the royal physiognomy. And while I appreciate the ease
of counting money after decimalisation, I still have a feeling something was lost
in the process—even more so once a quid became nothing but a virtual row
of zeros and ones spent with one careless swipe of a piece of plastic.

watercolour of a couple listening to a turntable

The last waltz

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

Waking up to Tom Traubert’s Blues
was never meant to be anything more
than a provisional unction
plastered over my troubled little I,
but with each hoarse waltz with Matilda,
my fingers became addicted
to the gentle brushing of the piano keys.

When I played it for you that morning,
you compared it to a glass of Chardonnay;
for me, it has always been more
like the rich savour of sun-dried tomatoes
bathed in sunflower oil,
but when you laughed in amusement at this,
the turntable stopped mid-word,

or perhaps it was us no longer present,
already honing the past.

watercolour of a devastated man sitting on a pile of cardboard boxes

Strategic retreat

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Once you span a lifetime of pity
with a pile of cardboard,
all that is left is one last goodbye,
despite knowing it’s just an empty gesture.

For a while, you try to keep up appearances,
but eventually you have to face the fact
that your dignified strategic retreat has fallen
on your tail between your legs.

watercolour with someone's hand pressing piano keys

The door to the soul

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I like Monday blues, pure peppermint tea,
and the smooth touch of piano keys.
I make flatbread using my own recipe,
find washing dishes by hand calming,
and respect the spiders living in my bathroom.

I buy books in second-hand bookshops
for the dedications and random notes
left inside by previous owners.
If there is a film that particularly appeals to me,
I watch it over and over again,
even several times a day if time allows.
I also never treat music as background noise,
and if I feel like listening to something,
I make sure to pay it full attention.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night
or can’t fall asleep at all, and if that happens,
I get up to write a verse or two.
In principle, I could say that I quite like myself
and my life if it weren’t for the thorns
of everything I hate. It turns out that the door
to someone’s soul is in the shadows.

watercolour with statue of justice

The paradox of justice

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Entangled in paradoxes of substance, you seek a principle
against which there is no convention, while all I ever wanted
was a quiet midday nap, tired of your persistent attempts
at convincing me that if I descended from the magic mountain
to the flatlands, I would see that, for instance, the only difference
between criminals and law-abiding citizens lies in the definition
of an act of crime, because if one sunny morning, let’s say, speech
became an offence, few of the latter would manage to maintain
their status. But I honestly don’t know what you expected
since the justice system was never really about justice
but about maintaining social order—the winner’s justice
was always the loser’s injustice.