Post Card

1
A post card sent by a friend
Haunts me
Since its arrival -
Warsaw: Panorama of the Old Town.
He requests i show it
To my parents.

Red busses on a bridge
Emerging from a corner -
High-rise flats and something
Like a park borders
The river with its concrete pylons.
The sky's the brightest shade.

2
Warsaw, Old Town,
I never knew you
Except in the third person -
Freat city
That bombs destroyed
Its people massacred
Or exiled - You survived
In the minds
Of a dying generation
Half a world away.
They shelter you
And defend the patterns
Of your remaking,
Condemn your politics,
Cherish your old religion
And drink to freedom
Under the White Eagle's flag.

For the moment,
I repeat, I never knew you,
Let me be.
I've seen red buses
Elsewhere
And all rivers have
An obstinate glare.
My father
Will be proud
Of your domes and towers,
My mother
Will speak of her
Beloved Ukraine.
What's my choice
To be?

I can give you
The recognition
Of eyesight and praise.
What more
Do you want
Besides
The gift of despair?

3
I stare
At the photograph
And refuse to answer
The voices
Of red gables
And a cloudless sky.

On the river's bank
A lone tree
Whispers:
"We will mett
Before you die."

-Peter Skrzynecki

Migrant hostel

Parkes, 1949-51

No one kept count
Of all the coming and goings -
Arrivals of newcomers
In busloads from the station,
Sudden departures from adjoining blocks
That left us wondering
Who would be coming next.

Nationalities sought
Each other out instinctively -
Like a homing pigeon
Circling to get its bearings;
Years and place-names
Recognised by accents,
Partitioned off at night
By memories of hunger and hate.

For over two years
We lived like birds of passage -
Always sensing a change
In the weather:
Unaware of the season
Whose track we would follow

A barrier at the main gate
Sealed off the highway
From our doorstep -
As it rose and fell like a finger
Pointed in reprimand or shame;
And daily we passed
Underneath or alongside it -
Needing its sanction
To pass in and out of lives
That had only begun
Or were dying.

-Peter Skrzynecki

Poem: Immigrants at Central Station, 1951

It was sad to hear
The train's whistle this morning
At the railway station.
All night it had rained.
The air was crowded
With a dampness that slowly
Sank into our thoughts -
But we ate it all:
The silence, the cold, the benevolence
Of empty streets.

Time waited anxiously with us
Behind upturned collars
And space hemmed us
Against each other
Like cattle bought for slaughter.

Families stood
With blankets and packed cases -
Keeping children by their sides,
Watching pigeons
That watched them.

But it was sad to hear
The train's whistle so suddenly -
To the right of our shoulders
Like a word of command.
The signal at the platform's end
Turned red and dropped
Like a guillotine -
Cutting us off from the space of eyesight

While time ran ahead
Along glistening tracks of steel.

-Peter Skrzynecki

Feliks Skrzynecki

My gentle father
Kept pace only with the Joneses
Of his own mind's making -
Loved his garden like an only child,
Spent years walking its perimeter
From sunrise to sleep.
Alert, brisk and silent,
He swept its paths
Ten times around the world.

Hands darkened
From cement, fingers with cracks
Like the sods he broke,
I often wondered how he existed
On five or six hours' sleep each night -
Why his arms didn't fall off
From the soil he turned
And the tobacco he rolled.

His Polish friends
Always shook hands too violently,
I thought... Feliks Skrzynecki,
That formal address
I never got used to.
Talking, they reminisced
About farms where paddocks flowered
With corn and wheat,
Horses they bred, pigs
They were skilled in slaughtering.
Five years of forced labour in Germany
Did not dull the softness of his blue eyes.

I never once heard
Him complain of work, the weather
Or pain. When twice
They dug cancer out of his foot,
His comment was: "but I'm alive".

Growing older, I
Remember words he taught me,
Remnants of a language
I inherited unknowingly -
The curse that damned
A crew-cut, grey-haired
Department clerk
Who asked me in dancing-bear grunts:
"Did your father ever attempt to learn English?"

On the back steps of his house,
Bordered by golden cypress,
Lawns - geraniums younger
Than both parents,
My father sits out the evening
With his dog, smoking,
Watching stars and street lights come on,
Happy as I have never been.

At thirteen,
Stumbling over tenses in Caesar's Gallic War,
I forgot my first Polish word.
He repeated it so I never forgot.
After that, like a dumb prophet,
Watched me pegging my tents
Further and further south of Hadrian's Wall.

-Peter Skrzynecki

27th Jan 2005

well, so i haven't been posting on my blog for a few days but then again, who the heck reads this anyways? Anyways, 2 am now. Just finished packing my table... if you count the stuff on my table strewn on my bed instead, i guess u could say i did a pretty darn good job ^.~

Oh! And i've finished reading Cloudstreet by Tim Winston. I highly recommend it. It's got everything! Vulgarities, raunchy bits, romance, etc. Well, that's all i can think of posting at the moment. I'll try to post more stuff later. Oh! and as for the economics definitions, the next one on the list is "ACCORD" and it'll be a cold day in hell before i type all that shiat out. Sorry to deprive you of daily economic lexicon enhancement. Out of total randomness, i shall now inject the phrase "Bite me" just for the fun of it.

I leave you with a quote from Cloudstreet.

It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away.

Tim Winton, Cloudstreet

See ya next time, ya drongos
Yes, you know i still wuv woooooo!!

What a man!

I just love that apron!

Seeing how all my other friends have got much nicer and more stuff on their blogs, i will now start my catching up attempt by posting random stuff which you, my dear dear sweet readers, would probably never use for in your life. So here goes nothing!

Quote from Australian Economics Dictionary For Students! Mwahahahahaha!~

Absolute Advantage (also called Law of Absolute Advantage) *cough cough T_T*
- the ability of a country to supply a commodity at lower cost than another country. It is one reason why international trade takes place. The theory was developed by Adam Smith in 1776.

Well, that's it for today. My fingers got tired. Hope you've enjoyed yourselves! You'd better add this page to your favourites... If you know what's good for you...

23012005

In this life and in the other...
after all that happened
I tried to hate you

but I found out
that I couldn't...
and searching for answers
I found them in your arms.

In that moment
I came to realise why

I couldn't hate you
because I loved you
ever more

First Post Ever!

Well, hello all. Welcome to my humble blog...

Prepare to be dazzled with wonderment... Stupefied by phenomenomical randomness that would leave you wondering how so much rubbish can come from a single person... So let's hop off to business shall we? alrightty... Hop this way please, quick as a bunny...

At the moment...

I...

have nothing to say =p. See, dumb with wonderment! Tadah!

Yes, i know that was lame but pretty good for my first post yes? Well, off i go to do some... stuff...

See you soon! sMiLe sMiLe!