I’ve made it to Mass, I couldn’t find a church
for three whole weeks, but finally I’ve made it
to Mass across the fields of my idleness, mountains
of narcissism, forests of hypocrisy, a sea of German
pilsner, and here I am, standing among old men, before me
der Geistliche wearing a gray sack and clapped-out sandals
is conducting the liturgy. Who are you to judge
– I chasten myself and listen as the florid
priest compares the descent of the Holy Spirit
to a gathering of old friends over whisky, telling tales
of his favorite distilleries in Scotland.
So once again I’m smiling to myself in my soul,
I look at the cross designed by a modern artist
on which Christ is smiling too,
sorrow engulfs me, I drop my head and there beneath my feet
I see oakwood parquet, exactly the same
as in the home of my childhood.
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Tadeusz Dąbrowski (b. 1979) Poet, essayist, critic. Editor-in-chief of the literary bimonthly Topos. He has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Agni, American Poetry Review, among others. Recipient of stipends awarded by Yaddo (2015), the Omi International Arts Center (NY, 2013), and the Vermont Studio Center (2011). Winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). He has been nominated for the NIKE Award (2010). His work has been translated into 30 languages. Author of ten volumes of poetry in his native Polish, from which the most recent are PUK (2026), Scrabble (2020), To jest fajka (2022) [This is a pipe] and PUK (2026), and a dozen in translation. He has also published a novel, Bezbronna kreska (2016) [Defenseless line], set in New York City, and a collection of essays on poetry, entitled In Metaphor (2024). Three of his collections, Black Square, POSTS and The Scent of Man have been published in English. He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. Her recent publications include (as compiler and co-translator) The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.
