Children
are smarter than us
know everything
even nothing to them has the hue of a chestnut
see mountains where we don’t see them
seas splash when nothing is heard
through their crooked teeth slip out
words known to no one
under dirty fingernails fear lurks
and an inexpressible adventure
when they run
their oversized shoes cackle
and their hair sticks to the wind
when they’re silent
their eyes express so much adult longing
they stand on tiptoe
to touch what’s forbidden
they try to wrestle with rules
to be able to tell the difference
between a joke and fear
sometimes they lie quietly on the floor
casting strange spells
and then the glass falls from the table
opportunity arises
a crayon moves slowly across the white wall
Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk
Julian Kornhauser was born in Gliwice in 1946 and is one of the most acclaimed figures of Polish poetry writing today, while also being a critic, translator and professor of South-Slavic literatures at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. A major figure of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, he has published eight books since the mid-1990s, including three collections of poetry, Kamyk i cień (1996), Było minęło (2001), and Origami (2007), in which a shift from collective preoccupations to a more personal and iconographic tone can be seen.