Poetry
The Elegy for... (1944)
Note
Baczyński wrote this poem in the same year that a German sniper shot him down in the streets of Warsaw, his hometown, during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Born in 1922, Baczyński is part of a lost generation of Polish youth, raised in the promise of a new age and freedom, slaughtered while still dreaming. The poem reflects on how the patriotism installed in them was both their hope and their demise. It becomes not just a personal lament, but a generational eulogy: Baczyński mourns his own fate and the fate of an entire generation whose futures were shaped by the war. Is patriotism ever more than just propaganda? Was their homeland a true inheritance of identity, or a carefully woven myth that demanded the erasure of the self?
They parted you, my little son, from dreams that fluttered near,
embroidered your sad eyes, my dear, with thread of rust and fear.
They painted fields in yellow flame, where ashes softly lie,
and stitched the sea with hanging trees beneath a burning sky.
They taught you, son, your native land—each furrow, path, and field,
you carved her roads with iron tears, with grief that would not yield.
They fed you on the bread of dread, they raised you in the night,
you walked by touch the most shameful ways known to humankind.
And then you went, my shining boy, into the dark with steel,
you felt the evil pulse of time, its cold and heavy wheel.
Before you fell, you blessed the ground, your hand a trembling arc.
Was it a bullet that struck you, son, or did your heart go dark?