October Sky - Tadeusz Borowski

October was beautiful. As if it were yesterday I remember

the strangely clear, strangely deep sky

shimmering in the noon heat as a leaf shimmers in the wind,

empty and unreachable. I am oddly melancholy

telling you about this, for what do words mean?

I saw the lines of smoke the wind traced on the elusive sky

and I waited for the moment

when this unreachable sky would lean toward them

to absorb them. After that there is nothing but

the poet’s sadness and a subject for a poem.

And once I saw the sky through window panes.

We had just been ordered to open the windows in the blockhouse

and walking by I saw the sky in the glass,

unexpected and wonderful, as if it were

a great camp. Posts stapled with wire,

roads I know so well, were suspended in air

and the grass sparkled in the glass of the window pane

dark green, as from the bottom of a lake. A red flame moved

across the sky and glistened on the grass in a russet stream.

Above this sky, a sky covered with smoke,

another sky hung clear and empty

and the smoke of the first sky drowned in the second.

And I realized that I didn’t know anything for certain,

that the earth and all that happens around me

are only a glass pane for someone else’s eyes.

Then someone blurred the picture and closed the window.

A moment long gone. The earth is real, and now I know

how real human suffering is.

But as a wave to shore, a moment of doubt returns

still, today, it still pierces me,

and always when I look at the December clouds

I see above them the October sky.

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Tadeusz Borowski (1922 - 1951) Poland

Translator not stated

Source: Poetry of Tadeusz Borowski