o water that takes your ownshapewhen you are very smallo single-celledyour name is a dropyou persist from high to lownot knowing a vesselo closed-within-yourselfyou perish when you openand you’ll give birth to the seaand be greetedby salt and dolphin and columbusand by susanna wallowingher hair in rainwatero droplet with nothingto differ you from droplethollower of stone
Incantation
Jerzy Ficowski
Translated from the Polish
Feature Date
- June 20, 2019
Series
- Translation
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First published in the Kenyon Review, Jan/Feb 2019, Vol. XLI, Number 1.
Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Lidia Ostałowska
Lidia Ostałowska
Jennifer Grotz’s most recent book of poems is Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). She is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Piotr Sommer is the author of Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and Overdoing It (Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2013). His collected poems, Po Ciemku Też, (Also in the Dark) appeared in Poland in 2013.
Jan/Feb 2019
Gambier, Ohio
Kenyon College
The David F. Banks Editor
Nicole Terez Dutton
Managing Editor
Abigail Wadsworth Serfass
Associate Editor
Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky
Poetry Editor
David Baker
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