Derrick Austin | Poetry
translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
A Test of What’s Luminous
At night in the village, something opens the dogs’ snouts. It begins
at the ravine. A fire of growls leaps to the house from a Labrador
down the street. The first one conveys something to the next.
Let’s call it: distress, panic—the sound it makes.
I turn on the light, the animals close their snouts. Turn it off. Open.
On. Closed. Off. Is it possible the same thing calms them as us?
Fine—I say—today we’re sleeping through a test of what’s luminous.
I look down the valley, scattered houses, flashes inside,
as if each person is conducting the same experiment tonight.
Zinc
On the westbound train I meet a woman who says she would give
birth—gladly, she stresses—to a sick child, one—even—without
a head, if god—if there is one, she stresses—were to bestow
such a mighty—as she calls it—blessing.
She gesticulates, white spots on her fingernails.
A zinc deficiency—I think.
She adds that she lives in the woods, but lately it’s been
wildly—as she stresses—unsettling: it’s the people,
they’ve started coming right up to her house.
Faithful Animal
Night here in the valley spreads out its vigil,
night of one place following after another.
A faithful animal. Step by step.
Nights of houses, landscapes: Romanian Carpathians,
Hungarian pusztas, Beskidy dells. And the moment it’s clear
you are now operating with a bygone vocabulary.
I touched, I buried, it spilled, shh.
Night keeps putting an eye—from outside—to the window
of a house you are trying to call yours, always
in that place where you’re pressing—from inside—
your own eye. Dark, and yet everything.
Trigger Points
Movement against loss. Summer has its autumnal thoughts.
Bets made with your own body. There are places where tension
accumulates, right here, and here (the neck, the pectorals).
Chaturanga. Upward facing dog. Downward facing dog.
Dog resting its forehead against the world, right here (the belly).
Weakness, its cavernous rooms. Look: out of the river basin
shadows amass.
Sage
Soon the city will lay its damp body close to the ground,
lower the blinds, those eyelids of heavy material, in order
to eat late dinners behind them: White meat of perch
seasoned with garlic, basil, sage. Add to this wine, no doubt
sauvignon blanc. A slice of white bread will neatly mop fat
from the plate.
Nothing should be wasted in such a season.
All this to lie down with a full belly in the fall,
as in childhood.
Below, on the map, bustle keeps at it: Southern countries. Someone
cleaning silver from the body of a fish. Someone wiping hands
on an apron, resting wine in chill, using spit to clean the glasses.
Gouache
The day here works in gouache technique. After December’s solstice, the structure
of light is different. Shadows of winter are different, and shadows of years.
A touch; beechwood blazes; a linden branch grows into a rafter; beechwood blazes.
And here we reach for books that help us close the mouth of night and open
our own—bulky tomes where loss is conceived as a canticle. Beechwood blazes.
The bones of the house are greedy. Beechwood burns more slowly than birch.
The flames are rising, but slowly—you have time to pull your hand away.
Małgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet, fiction writer, mountaineer, ultramarathon runner, and photographer. She is the author of six award-winning poetry collections, including Mer de Glace (Warstwy, 2021), which received the prestigious Wislawa Szymborska Prize. In 2023, she published her prose debut, Voracious (Linden Editions, 2025; translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), which won the “Empik Discovery” Award and was a finalist for the Angelus Central European Literary Award, the Nike Literary Award, and the Conrad Prize. The novel has been translated into Spanish and English, and there are translations into Czech, Serbian, French, German, Ukrainian, and Dutch currently underway, as well as a film adaptation. Lebda holds a Ph.D. in Literary Theory and Audiovisual Arts and teaches in the creative writing department at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, Ukrainian, and Danish. She lives—along with her herd—in the Jaworzyna Krynicka Mountains.
Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter (Archipelago Books, 2024) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award for the best book translated from Polish in 2024. She is the author of Territorial (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World (Kent State University Press, 2011), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her essays, poems, and translations appear regularly in such journals as Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, and A Public Space.
This essay is part of the eleventh installment of our “Literature and Democracy” series. This quarterly column, curated by NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey, presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world, beginning with a focus on Eastern Europe. You can access the rest of the feature here.