Ghetto: Two Living Children Anna Swir Screaming ceased long ago on that street. Only the wind sometimes plays with a torn-out window in which the remnants of a windowpane still glitter, and carries over cobblestones feathers from ripped-open eiderdowns. At times the same wind brings a sudden shout of many people from far away. Then it happens that from a cross street two living children walk out unexpectedly. Holding each other's hands they escape silently through the middle of a deserted street. Up to the spot where, hidden behind a street corner wrapped in mist, a German soldier at a machine gun watches day and night on the border of the ghetto.
--tr. Czeslaw Milosz, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon) | 
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2 comments:
I love Anna Swir's poems. Here is one from a new translation by Piotr Florczyk.
I CARRIED BEDPANS
I worked as an orderly at the hospital
without medicine and water.
I carried bedpans
filled with pus, blood and feces.
I loved pus, blood and feces—
they were alive like life,
and there was less and less
life around.
When the world was dying,
I was only two hands, handing
the wounded a bedpan.
I've posted some more of the poems from his translation at Writing the Polish Diaspora--http://writingpolishdiaspora.blogspot.com/2011/03/poems-about-warsaw-uprising-1944.html
I forgot to mention. Anna Swir's poem was written to the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944.
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