Lamentations on the News of a Poet’s Death as the American Media Turns a Crisis for Refugees into a Threat to the Nation
On the passing of Adam Zagajewski
“It could be Bosnia today,” he wrote in the 1990s,
Poland in September ‘39, France
eight months later, Germany in ‘45,
Somalia, Afghanistan, Egypt.1
It could be the American southern border today. Men and women, families, lone children scramble north from war and poverty and the damage wrought by a shifting climate. Seek asylum. Shelter.
It is a crisis. For the refugees. Starting in their home countries. Starting in the Golden Triangle in Central America. In Mexico. Across the Southern Hemisphere. A crisis of violence and political dysfunction. Abetted by American foreign policy. By American corporations. Exacerbated here by lacking resources. By a lack of shelter beds. By too few bureaucrats to process applications. By decades of anti-immigrant sentiment that periodically blossoms into full-blown rage, as it did with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a rage that has ebbed but not disappeared.
Zagajewski understood this rage. Understood the motivations of the refugees. The never-ending movement toward something, “that special slouch”
as if leaning toward another, a better planet,
with less ambitious generals,
less snow, less wind, fewer cannons,
less History (alas, there’s no
such planet, just that slouch).
My grandparents had that slouch. Our parents and grandparents. Great grandparents and aunts and uncles and so many siblings. Slouching “under burdens which sometimes / can be seen and sometimes can’t.”
On the news, reporters ride with the Border Patrol. See the border through agents’ eyes. Point to the crowded facilities, real travesties of humanity, then ask the wrong questions. They ask why we allow them to come. Not why we, rich country that we are, lack the resources to treat the people fleeing violence, the people Zagajewski describes as “trudg(ing) through mud or desert sands, / hunched, hungry,” a population clutching at the past but slowly moving toward an uncertainty they can only hope will be better.
These migrants, reports the AP, “arrive in the middle of the night by the dozens and are kept at outdoor intake sites, then taken to overcrowded detention facilities well past the 72-hour court-imposed limit.” They are released here or sent back to Mexico. The unaccompanied children, the fastest growing cohort among the refugees, get dumped in overcrowded federal shelters. Get used by politicians as rhetorical weapons. They are robbed of their history. Their present twisted into a different kind of indignity, as we frame their presence as an invasion. It is not.
“These are children who are escaping really terrible, awful conditions who are making a very long, scary journey because the conditions at home offer no other alternative,” Sergio Gonzales of The Immigration Hub told Amanda Terkel.
Children. Parents. Families. Refugees.
silent men in heavy jackets,
dressed for all four seasons,
old women with crumpled faces,
clutching something — a child, the family
lamp, the last loaf of bread?
Human history is a history of movement. Across the Beringia2. Across the oceans. The deserts. Jacob traveling from Hebron to Egypt to escape famine. We move because we must move, our motion built of a “yearning” that “mingled with the highways’ dust.”*** Our stasis met with “dreams (that) raged in us, heavy, treacherous, / like surf beneath a full moon.” And we were shaken by fear, awakened “and again we moved on, cursing fate and filthy inns.”
This is Zagajewski writing in the voice of the magi, but transported to the modern era.“The Three Kings”3 was published in 1997, included in Without End: New and Selected Poems (like all of the poems in this essay). After the fall of Communism. Before 911. When the lie of peace was offered by the war mongers who populate our governments. We are always moving, the poem implies, but always waylaid. By “desert and laughter and music.” By “spring meadows.” By “cowslips, / the glances of country maidens / hungry for a stranger’s love.”
The speaker in “The Three Kings” recounts the yellow star “seen carelessly to a coat / like a school insignia,” a brief reference to the brutality man can inflict on man, then slides forward:
The taxi smelled of anise and the twentieth century,
the driver had a Russian accent.
Our ship sank, the plane shook suddenly.
We quarreled violently and each of us
set out in search of a different hope.
Hope. A mirage, really. “I barely remember what we were looking for.” The present, like the past, war torn, marked by the violence that wracked the century nearing its end.
“Perhaps I’d be happy,” the speaker says, “if it weren’t for the light that explodes / above the city walls each day / at dawn,” (The real light of the morning? Bomb blasts? Both?) “blinding my desire.”
Zagajewski died March 21. He was 75. He’d lived through the worst that the post-WWII years could offer, though occupation of his Polish homeland, its emancipation. Its takeover by the right.
“I lost two homelands,” The New York Times quoted him saying, referring to Poland and his hometown of Lvov, “but I sought a third: a space for the imagination.”
For humanity, I’d add. Empathy. Humor.
“What sings is what stays silent,” he wrote in “Where Breath Is.”4 In that way, Adam Zagajewski will always sing. Always connect the past to the present. Always be a presence.
Zagajewski, Adam. “ Refugees.” Without End: New and Selected Poems, 2002, Farrah, Strauss, Giroux, pp. 228-229. Subsequent references to Zagajewski’s poems come from this book.
A prehistoric land bridge believed to link what is now modern-day Russia and Alaska
“Three Kings,” pp. 218-219
“Where the Breath Is,” p. 22.