Listen to Shannon Kuta Kelly read this poem.

Once a unified town, Cieszyn is now divided into two towns, one in Poland and one in
Czechia; street signs remain in Polish on the Czech side as a reminder.

I.
Brother, I am tired.
Let me cross your waters.
Let me walk carelessly
on your cobbles
and sip coffee with kind neighbors
who live peacefully in a red house.
I have little to offer in return
but quiet Sunday afternoons
and empty streets lazing
in the sun.

Brother, the river is narrow,
but time is long and winding.
Your tongue was clipped,
and I can hardly understand you.
Your words now are a memory of a dream.
It is true, I took the pink light,
but you took the border.
When you see the mint and robin-egg-blue
buildings melting lovely in the noontime,
do not forget I house the dead within my arms.

II.
Brother, they say age makes us softer.
I am thinking of our threadbare pockets
in the early days together,
when even a solitary silver coin
was a field sprouting in my palm.
Do you remember the joy we felt
when we finally met one another
after those years of wandering?
How we embraced under the linden tree,
how the summer air carried a trace
of winter within it?

True, poverty used to live in this village,
but remember, brother,
it was driven out with music,
and the river was a witness.
You would know this story
if the banks had not become so wide.
Now when the young woman
calls to her lover on the other side,
he cannot understand her.

III.
Brother, would you believe it?
Today a traveler appeared
and asked for you by name,
and conjured unknowingly
the long light of July evenings.
Just last week a little girl
tossed off her shoes at my banks
and splashed off towards you,
and I was again, for a moment,
a young man, watching the horizon.

I wake, sometimes, brother
and hear the rumble of distant trains,
and look off to the mountains,
and everything is yours—the smoke
over the blue caps of the Bieszczady,
the delicate tips of wheat
against the first blue of morning.
Everything is a border, brother.
Everywhere is a border.
I will meet you there.

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