Two Poems

John Guzlowski

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Proteus: A Journal of Ideas (Fall 2003) recently had a special issue devoted to essays about “Interpreting Lives: Personal Narratives and Biographies,” and when I saw a notice about it last year at this time, I thought a couple of my poems would work just fine for that theme. One of the poems was “Cattle Train to Magdeburg.” It was an old poem, one of the first in the series about my parents. I think I wrote it in 1978. A long time ago. When I first had it published in a collection called Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, I showed it to my mother and she wouldn’t read it. That was all in the past, she said. She didn’t want to think about the war, and what her life was like in the labor camps. Last year when the Polish collection of my poems came out, I showed a copy to my mother. Since my father died, she’s become more willing to talk about her experiences in Germany. So she took the book, and the first poem she saw was “Cattle Train to Magdeburg.” She read it fast and told me what she thought. Her response led to the “My Mother Reads ‘Cattle Train to Magdeburg.’” If I were to show her the second poem, I’m betting she would say the same thing she said after I showed her the first.—JZG

 

Cattle Train To Magdeburg

She still remembers
The long train to Magdeburg
the box cars
bleached gray
by Baltic winters

The rivers and the cities
she had never seen before
and would never see again:
the sacred Vistula
the smoke haunted ruins of Warsaw
the Warta, where horse flesh
met steel and fell

The leather fists
of pale boys
boys her own age
perhaps seventeen
perhaps nineteen
but different
convinced of their godhood
by the cross they wore
different from the one
she knew in Lvov

The long twilight journey
to Magdeburg
four days that became six years
six years that became forty

And always a train of box cars
bleached to Baltic gray

My Mother Reads "Cattle Train to Magdeburg"

She reads it through and says
“That’s not how it was.
I couldn’t see anything
except when they stopped
the boxcars and opened the doors

And I didn’t see
any of those rivers,
and if I did, I didn’t know
their names. No one said,
‘Look, look this river
is the Warta, and there
that’s the Vistula.’

What I remember
is the bodies being
pushed out—sometimes
women would kick them out
with their feet.

Now it sounds terrible.

You think we were bad women
but we weren’t. We were girls
taken from homes, alone.
Some had seen terrible things
done to their families.

Even though you’re a grown man
and a teacher, we saw things
I don’t want to tell you about.”