IRENA

Irena Manka (ne Grzyb)
Jan. 21, 1923 - April 10, 2003

At the end of October, 2003, my wife and I visited Poland to carry out her mother Irena’s last wishes. We drove from Warsaw to Chmielno (near Prague) where relatives arranged a funeral in a small but beautiful unheated country church. Though Irena and her family still called Pinsk home (now Belarus, then eastern Poland), Irena’s ashes now rest where she wanted to be buried, next to her grandmother, in the last remaining plot in the tiny church graveyard, formerly Germany. Home again, I was moved to try to capture something of Irena's tragic life story in this poem:

Traveling with her daughter,
in a public square in Italy’s Milan,
a short dumpy old woman in a black dress
pigeons circling around her upstretched hand,
Irena is the picture of joy and rapture
captured by a street photographer.

A former cleaning lady
who made ends meet by taking in lodgers,
seemingly merely a lonely old widow
in a trim brick English house
with a colorful garden
who spoke a Polish-English
I could understand only with difficulty,
even with all her years
away from her mother country
(I wondered how she managed).

Her husband had been
a blast furnaceman at an ironworks ...
hard, hot, dirty work ...
with other Poles starting again
in quonset huts
in Lubbinham, England’s resettlement camp,
after wartime trauma.

Scarred and still angry from their suffering
still they improved their lot ...
acquiring new possessions
and a house in a good Nottingham neighborhood ...
and passed down anger and old hurts
to a son and a daughter, along with
(to daughter only, it seems)
an undying love
of all that is Polish.

It was Irena’s great longing
to see again the idolized
place of her happy childhood
(she claimed to have "dokumunts"
valid to reclaim her lost land)
from which she and family
and friendly neighbors
(only her grandmother escaped)
were uprooted by Russians one dark night ...
herded to near starvation
in forest work camps
in frozen Siberia.

The rural community near Pinsk
Poland no longer -- now Belarus
(Yalta politics, you know)
a close-knit extended family
dispersed ... where ... ?
What had happened to ... ?
Was ... still alive???
For over forty years
under communist rule
they were forbidden to ask.

Not yet twenty,
Irena bottled her anger at her mother
(buried in a mass grave in remote Uzbekistan)
for dying of typhoid
as they traveled south in hopes of food,
after gaining freedom from the camps.
How could she leave her
to look after two younger sisters
(they’d started with four)
and two younger brothers
alone?

Hoping her brothers
would be picked up as orphans
and thus fed
Irena felt best to abandon them
never to know what happened ...
until re-finding each other in England
(no sister survived).

Now an old woman,
having lost
father, mother, community, homeland,
Irena’s question persisted:
what had happened to everyone?
With but few clues barely legible
in a heavily fingered address book,
and a daughter who came from America
to chauffer her,
she knocked hopefully on strange doors
... France, Italy, Poland, Belarus ...
doors that opened with blank suspicious looks, then
a joyous shock of recollection, recognition.

Emotion laden networking:
worn photos, memories, hearsay, all shared,
neighbor put in touch again with neighbor,
deaths mourned.

Their next-to-last last trip to Poland together
mother and daughter found,
in a small graveyard
by an old unheated rural church in Chmielno
(once Germany, taken and given the Poles
in place of their land now Belarus)
Irena’s grandmother’s gravestone,
next to an unused plot ...
the last left in the graveyard.
"That’s where I want to be buried."
The priest agreed to arrange it.

Two years later, All Saints Day upon them,
Irena's daughter carried from England
a small wooden casket of ashes
and sang a moving "Ave Maria"
to a handful of people in an old cold, unheated
beautiful and light
yellow-painted brick church.

Who was the dumpy old woman in black?
Is it true? Was she
merely
an old Polish cleaning woman
ever hopeful who played the lottery,
took in lodgers
and found joy in feeding pigeons?

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