Jacek Kaczmarski - Katyń

Pressuring to the light like skin layers
Crowd of staring faces from under the turf.
They look one from the other - up -
But there are no ruins. It is not an extinct borough.

Once discovered - they scream with musty lips,
They fly over their arms rotten inside
Into the ditch, that will never be empty again -
But there are no crosses. These are not the ancestors' graves.

Buckles and buttons with rusty eagle,
On the skulls - worms are racing.
Rotten photos, memorabilia, maps of towns and villages -
But no weapons. It is not a battlefield.

Maybe they all were victims of sickness?
The same round injuries on their necks
Through which God's gift seeped to the soil -
But there are no signs that this is the grave of plague.

The trees that saw it all are still growing,
The earth remembers the shape of shoe, the taste of blood,
Heaven knows the language in which the commands were falling,
Before the gunshots have fallen, with which Heaven still sounds.

But these witnesses are alive - so they are biased.
Besides, to listen to them - you need to go the zone.
Their Master can count on silence of these witnesses
Master of air and earth and imprisoned trees.

Here is world without death. World of death without murder,
World of murder without order, order without voice.
World of voice without body and body without God,
World of God without name, name - without fate.

There is only one side of a world like that,
Where something that does not exist - still cries for vengeance.
Where grave is not even honoured with laughter,
A hole hard to bypass - for eagle, falcon...

"At one dawn in the Katyn forest
The Soviets were shooting at us..."