Tadeusz Rozewicz - GOLDEN MOUNTAINS

The first time

I saw mountains

was when I was twenty six

years of age

I didn't laugh

didn't shout

in their presence

I spoke in whisper

When I returned home

I went to tell

my mother

what mountains look like

It was difficult to tell

at night

everything looks different

mountains and words

mother was silent

maybe she was tired

and fell asleep

in the clouds

the Moon grew

the golden mountain

of poor people

Translated by W.F.

Tadeusz Rozewicz (pron. Tadewoosh Roozhevich) (1921 - 2014)

The third of the three great post-war poets of Poland. Born in a small town in central Poland, during the war he was a member of the underground resistance army fighting the Nazis. After the war he studied History of Art, but never finished it. He was one of the first post-war poets to write in an open verse. Reflected in those poems is the terror of war, but never despair. For some reason his poems were published before 1956, during the Stalinist era, even though Rozewicz in his poetry never praised socialism or Stalin. Thus for a reader living in the country it would appear that Rozewicz was the first important poet to write in a modern style. In the hindsight we know that at the same time Herbert wrote no less modern poems, but didn’t publish them, whereas Czeslaw Milosz published his poetry abroad.