POEM: Courier
Author's Note: Former Polish cavalry officer, escaped prisoner of the Nazis, and ardent Catholic Jan Karski risked his life and dared to confront US President Franklin Roosevelt early with the first-hand truth of the Nazi holocaust, asking that US forces destroy paths into death camps and save the intended victims. This year - June 24, 2014 - is the centennial of Karski's birth.
COURIER
for the students of Jan Karski
whom he never told of his 1942 mission
I. Warsaw
He turns his back
on the trolley wires
Night snow deepens
Horses float in alleys
Windows blind in blackout
ignore his passage
past habitations hunkering
in the sour wash of war
Now, the appointed doorway—
Two Joshuas [1]
one stately one wild
squint at the courier
bulge their eyes
blast rams’ horns
for millions trapped
in a world of assassins
The echoes cling
like a ghostly surplice [2]
He grasps the relic [3]
received from his confessor
its touch like lamb
like wind from an olive grove
His breath comes hard
I will go with You to the ghetto
to count women in patched cowls
paring rotted onions
to time the stripping of countrymen
still warm on the cobblestones
to memorize the whispers of boys
sneaking back from districts
where pubs roar with lovers
to spy on fair-haired marksmen
eager for rabbis’ heads
He tucks the remnant of Christ’s thin chest
next to his and the two
slip through tunnels
as brothers
Inside the walls
ten thousand wander
a wilderness keening
over promises [4]
II. Belzec [5]
A rented room Shadows
seep across the rug
Beneath the haze streetcars
shake cobblestones
Hours tilt pinballs
of memory:
Warm bread passes
through wire behind barracks
In the skull—explosions
from a truncheon
designed by doctors
to leave no marks
The wrist flexes
for the razor’s slash
In a public garden
his old professor tests him
on questions of fate
Suddenly: a signal—he speeds
to meet a moon-faced herdsman
of the doomed to don
a like uniform [6]
to grease a palm
again to touch the scapular
that keeps the feet steady
Black clouds boil
over trampled fields
cramped by thorny wire
Roofless kings
steeped in sewage
chant Poor Tom [7]
poor Mendel poor Anna
poor Moishele paralyzed
in his father’s fear
naked fools who bleed
from hand and foot
eyeing things distant
or dead surging
in a sea of voltage
Pistols jolt cow-eyed mobs
up runways into boxcars
laced with quicklime
God speed, mes chers [8]
The train lingers
till the last child’s tongue
is still
III. London
Yes he’d told them I will [9]
seek out the bishops and rulers
in tailored suits and tick back
the punctured skulls
the ovens
the numbers in waiting
in the newsreel whose projector
was spiked
A wheeze of leaping dogs
sears his heels zigzagging
over flinty fishbone alps
Hunger gnaws the bowel
in every third class car
Prudence bites the tongue
unseen by squinting eyes
Gibraltar at last
then winged slumber
in northerly skies
toward sooty sunlight on St Paul’s
to beef sickening with fat
to exiled women choiring
crystal phrases of Pilsudski [10]
To the embassy’s hush
a cigarette’s pungent rush
his Friend calm at his breast
Together they tell
tick by deadly tock
the minutes left of shouting
and what the shouting says
Brandy perhaps?
It’s hard to hear...
Say [11]
that we shall win the war... [12]
And after the day’s roar
from pastoral airfields [13]
a silence
a muffled thump of the heart
IV. America
Black eagles rise [14]
in ragged squadrons
from overturned trucks
from rib-caged barracks
from charred town halls
ringed with rotted flowers
splattered with lead
abandoning double-headed banners
Black wings beat west
over bays slimed with fuel
oozing from gashed hulls
over oceans tracked with troopships
lumbering toward skylines
sparkling against sunset
to model homes & winged cars [15]
to the gates of factories
where gray flannels waltz
with army pinks [16]
to underground laboratories
to tables spread with Riesling
to legion halls in Chicopee
Cleveland Milwaukee Chicago
where rocket launchers nest
in concrete slabs out front
where White eagles strut with Black [17]
behind the sticky varnish of the bar
next to baseballs and footballs
trophies of the Polish pope
trophies from bunkers and Bangkok baths
Men with mildew-hair and brew
talk of hard times
of the anchorwoman’s boobs
of the candidate’s Jewish wife
of mama’s-boys defending
in fancy whiny words
pornographers addicts jigaboos
every wednesday every Friday
every musty year
Now they’ve spread the Stars & Stripes
opposite the White Eagle
The craggy speaker
once Polish cavalry officer
once courier for the Underground
for Europe’s Jews
tells in steely accent
how he listened
how he reported
How the Minister
and the President
lifted their eyes above the damned
to the clash of soldiers
How a Justice rejected the facts [18]
A listener rises from his seat [19]
to question his responsibility
Jewish guests after all
had outworn their welcome
The old courier’s eyes seize
the bulging neck-flesh
of his fraternal host
Summoned by lords
to bring ten thousand millers
to our granaries
they built docks
roads
raised families
paid taxes
endured repeated indignities
wept
endured invasions
prayed
doctored us
five hundred years
Your brothers—guests?
Scars on the courier’s face
grow hard
He moves from confession
to communion
to legion hall
to lecture hall
to TV studio
to state house
to clubhouse
grasping the collars of countrymen
faster now
his Friend is impatient
* * *
Epigraph
NOTES
[1] Hebrew Bible: Joshua 1:9; 6:9
[2] surplice: a priestly outer garment
[3] relic: remnant of a holy object, in this case, a soft leather scapular—representation of Jesus. See lines 28, 39, 74, 130, and 241.
[4] promises: God’s covenant of protection. Also Nazi assurances of safety in the ghetto.
[5] Belzec: the first Nazi extermination camp, in SE Poland
[6] like uniform: camp guard’s uniform
[7] Poor Tom: Shakespeare, King Lear, III.iv (Edgar in madman disguise, personifying the calamitous storm on the heath with Lear, his fool, and the blind Gloucester)
[8] German officers using French phrases sarcastically
[9] them: the Joshuas; see 13
[10] Pilsudski: Polish general, liberator, and chief of state, during and after WWI
[11], [12] President Roosevelt’s words
[13] British fighter planes and bombers
[14] black eagles: symbol on German imperial coat-of-arms, often double-headed
[15] winged cars: on Cadillacs and other fashionable American cars
[16] pinks: then current shade of army dress uniform trousers
[17] white eagles: symbol on Polish state coat-of-arms, single-headed
[18] Before seeing Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told Karski that he couldn’t believe his extermination story.
[19] at the Polish-American Citizen’s Club
Dave Lewit is a social psychologist and system-change activist in Boston. An organizer for the Alliance for Democracy, he edited BCA Dispatch. Presently he is organizing for public banking in Massahcusetts and, with California's Center for Process Studies, a group to promote a democratic economic system globally.
