Two Poems by John Guzlowski

On My 64^th Birthday I Think of Dostoevsky

He had no 64^th birthday, his death

put a stop to that—a late winter’s day,

a dropped pen holder he couldn’t pick up,

an argument over payment for some work,

the usual trivia triggering the blood

spilling out of his lungs, into his throat

and mouth, his wife Anna screaming,

pleading with him to stop the red tide

vomiting past his teeth and lips, but how

could he?  He knew what he knew. 

There is no cure for death.

It stopped when it was ready to stop. 

And then there was just her weeping

begging for some hope, some words

that would tell her he was still there

gaining his strength in the darkness.

At a Conference on “The Road and the City:

Mobility and Stasis in the Twentieth Century”

Somebody reads a paper about Primo Levi,

The Holocaust as just another road trip:

The dying road of the cattle cars and rail lines

That led to Auschwitz, the dead city of the 20th

Century where everything we learn about freedom

Vanishes in snow and pain and gray smoke;

And he tells us Levi’s death on the stairs

In Turin, his suicide’s hands reaching

Like the wings of a phoenix for the sky,

Pays homage as only a great artist can

To James Joyce’s dream of Dedalus’s flight

Into a world beyond the poor Mick’s world

Of bogs and lime and ice-forming crystals

On the graves of all those who don’t seek

The road that leads to the final city we dream of.

And I turn away into silence, to my own graves,

Those of my father and mother who came

With nothing and left with nothing, watched

Their roads disappear like the smoke from the bodies

Left in the roads and on the sides of the roads

By those who drove past in armored cars and tanks

Heading for the Holy City on the Hill

Where their own graves waited for them like

Children hungry for their mother’s touch

And the happy sound of their father’s voice.

John Guzlowski's writing appears in Rattle, North American Review, and other journals.  Echoes of Tattered Tongues, his memoir about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, won the Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Award.  He is the author of three novels and a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.