http://diogenplus.weebly.com/krystyna-lenkowska.html Krystyna Lenkowska, Poland
Krystyna Lenkowska is a Polish poet and translator. She has published seven collections of poetry. Her poems in English have appeared in USA, in Boulevard, Chelsea, Confrontation and Absinthe. She has been also translated and published in other languages, Ukranian, Italian and Albanian among others.
Photograph C Grażyna Niezgoda
Poruka ljubavi i nade
Suština prolaznosti unutar iščekivanja beskonačnosti. Ljubavi, prije svega. Prirodna predanost iskrenosti osjećanja kao pretpostavka mogućih nadanja. Spremnosti da prizna kako bješe, jeste, i sutra će biti samo zrno pjeska unutar alternativnih sjećanja. Snaga poezije Krystine Lenkowske nije u onome što je napisala već u onome što nije. Kako? Jednostavno, kada čitate njenu poeziju imate osjećaj da namjerno izostavlja dijelove svoje duše i da vas poetikom poziva da priđete još bliže, kako bi vam šapnula nešto nenapisano. Upravo tako. Čekam da mi tiho naglasi suštinu poruke. Griješim, ovdje se radi o množini: poruka. Pjesme su njene poruke. Zrele, nadahnute poetese - dame kojoj poezija služi (ali i ona njoj - vice versa) da pošalje poruku. Kakvu poruku? Svako od nas će je drugačije razumjeti, jer onoga trenutka kada pjesnik napiše stih, pjesmu, ona ne pripada više njemu/njoj, već onome ko je čita, upija. Tako i ja. Još uvijek čitam. I ne prestajem. Poruku. Riječ urednika Sabahudin Hadžialić 22.11.2011. Message of love and hope
The essence of transience within the expectation of infinity. Love, above all. Natural commitment to honesty of the feelings as a prerequisite of possible hope. Willingness to recognize that she was, sh is, and tomorrow will be just a grain of sand in the alternative memories. The power of poetry Krystina Lenkowske is not in something that is already written, but in something that is not written. How? Simply, when you read her poetry, you feel that she deliberately leaves out parts of her soul and make she invites you with her the poetry that you shoudl come even closer to be able to whisper something unwritten, to you. Exactly like that. I am waiting for her to quietly emphasize the essence of the message. I'm wrong, here it is plural: messages. The poems are her messages. Mature, inspired poetess - lady to whom poetry serves (and her to it-vice versa) to send the message.Which kind of message? Each of us will understand it differently, because exactly on the same moment when the poet writes verse, poem, it no longer belongs to him / her, but anyone who read it, absorb it. So I did. Still reading. Do not cease. The message. Editor's word Sabahudin Hadžialić 22.11.2011. I-She
This old woman wearing a hat and a mink stole on her shoulders celebrating her memory is me. I watch her at close quarters. I can see clearly her laugh lines. She lifts a doughnut to the place on her skin where my lips used to be. She opens her face and shoves in a doughnut stuck on her finger. The finger has thickened joints like a spring twig, like Edith Piaf. How will I touch your body with her claw-like tibia? She raises her face to your face. I close my eyelids. She forgets she has no lips. I forget. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough For the New Century-A Conversation with Myself In some pose the mirror captured this moment of transformation when for the first time the tibia peeked out with all its literalness. I didn't think about identity or about Emerson's equation or about the romanticism of burial mounds. I didn't think. I couldn't it couldn't. Only it was or it wasn't at the tangential point zero or infinity a simple configuration of bones. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough To Moment's Measure A hand mine yours someone's on another hand on top of a white glove a moment's measure. Several hurried meanings which barely sound synonymous. Suddenly right under my ring nail I feel the accelerated pulse of this other cosmos. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough Translator Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough's poetry translations have been published i USA by Absinthe, Image, The New Yorker, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, and other literary magazines. Snow Ryszard Kapuściński died today You are falling as many of us fall under gravity's weight You are flying From where we all come. You are leaning against time and earth Deer marks trace after you A dog falls inside you with such an obviousness In its eyes that it makes my flesh creep. In Subcarpathian Słocina you are the same As in Turkish Kars A legend of Herodots. Love, death and trash are under you Lightly stamped. You are geometry on glass A glass on the road. They crush our fragile bodies In your majesty. Pieces of rockets from Baykonur fall on your head for us But you are lying on your back in the Altai Mountains An untouchable equilibrist Oh, my white idealist. Translated by Janusz Zalewski and John Guzlowski Krakow-Warsaw West I feel the greatest longing at train stations in angular wating rooms on dim platforms and when the train pulls out and passes the backs of houses the city's cesspool the other side of walls the pitch-black yards the rickety fences those unfulfilled garden plots. I long for places and people left behind for the way they could have been for me but are for others I even long for those I have never met who still belong irrevocably to my past. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough They Come They Go For some time now people have done nothing but die. For instance, recently, Mr. Raczy the watchmaker. It gets harder and harder to look into the eyes of those who didn't consider such a possibility. Let's say, Daria, the wife. The dead are overgrown with names, lips, hands. You can't die without them (anyway you couldn't till now). Hair and teeth grow after they're gone. And it's difficult to imagine a country where they don't exist. They are such a presence that they cause us sleepless nights parch our lips. Like lovers' living bodies. And when after many years we accept their mercy they leave in a hurry. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough Love It gets up first and bustles in my head arranges images and the sequence of emotions steps aside tries to walk softly as if it's never existed. I don't touch it mornings that's our agreement and I wait for it to wash away in the monotony of memory in the disloyalty of time. I wait so at last I won't have to wait all day long. Evening comes and what's next my dear Lao Tzu? Here I stutter and confound the audience those squinting eyes of a chinese cat. Always at the same place in the dusk I cross over to the other side of the word beyond the image. The idea of self-eclipse doesn't exist there. There's an entry into light one period of time and love's trusting unhumiliated face at the level of our eyes and lips. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough 
An Overdue Letter to a Pimply Angel
Do you remember the smell of snow with soot, still warm from the chimney? And the taste of cut fir branches? In the morning you meekly pulled my rusty sled so that I, the first of the first, would leave triumphant tracks of winter in the yard. In the evening you hung proudly on the tree in pink skirts of tissue paper high and low. I couldn't count you. "Happiness is," you said, "when you don't know how much there is of it." One winter you sneaked behind the Christmas tree in lacy hoarfrost stockings. The white girdle, your first stocks of femininity, wouldn't leave you alone. You caressed your thighs under the skirt to make their material real. You were hormonally sad from happiness. Just like later that spring when your first egg was fertilized with one divine life and swelled in your mouth. It stretched your bitter-salty palate into a balloon of hopeless December hope. You knew all its parameters. You still were my angel. When you broke into limbs and fell slowly, I didn't hand you a wing. Forgive me. I myself was a pimply flightless bird. Hail God's Bird from the Christmas tree of life. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough The Fifth One Every moment I kill one tender thought as if it were a persistent fly. But it wants only to live. I imagined love like a gigantic fruit fly. I wonder who would then be the first to die the unnatural death: I, it, or this fruit of paradise. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough O Torch, O Rose Who are you, o torch, o rose, wreath of thorns, spur and mare, djigit a blind mule at night, daybreak, the trumpet of Jericho? Weren't you the toppled wall that crumbles and throws the fear of restraint into our eyes? Were you Miss Capulet, holy adulteress Hester Prynne, the almost tamed shrew, seductive Mrs. Robinson, or maybe Cleopatra's enticing eye on the steps above the walls for your divine feet? Bloody Lady Macbeth or hemlock itself? Or maybe you're life itself, its shiver, its prayer in clenched fingers? Maybe for you armies advance in alluring formations, ecstatic trumpets sound, for you cloaks are lined with opulent fabric and faithful praetorians bend the mountain shadow to make your forehead glow in the saddle? O torch, o rose! Unveil the next scarlet letter of the era of the alphabet, let us read in what language we'll have to live and grow silent together to be ready again. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough A Man Wearing a Cap A man wearing a cap slowly killed a goose. He held it between his legs as if it were a tongue-lashed child or a woman who'd drunk hemlock and then been forced to vomit. A cat sensually watched the ritual. Nearby people busy with life were passing. Only the sound of the forest and my heart could be heard. The silence of that picture hit me in the face. Oh, well. The millennium goose, the cat, and us. All cannon fodder. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough 
Krystyna Lenkowska in Tetovo International Poetry Festival "DITET ET NAIMIT", October 2011.
Krystyna Lenkowska sitting fourth from the left in Tetovo International Festival "DITET ET NAIMIT", October 2011.
Krystyna Lenkowska standing second from the right in Tetovo International Festival "DITET ET NAIMIT", October 2011.
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