Night

The poem
first shuts you inside.
It doesn’t want
you to look around, search
for different words
in different poems.

You sit cornered in the stone,
a scrunched
sheet of paper.
Defenceless and resigned,
you don’t breathe. The poem
won’t allow.

Inside the stone you can’t
fidget or use
a bed a watch a map
and all the rest
of your imagination.

The poem
has its own imagination,
erected in yours,
then shut inside
to free itself.

You have to wait
in the corner of the stone,
where the golden dust
of hope occasionally glints.

In the end the poem
will open itself. The stone
will let you out: a sheet of paper
that will begin to breathe.

- Wojciech Bonowicz
 Translation by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese