Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

She.
Hannah Arendt
Euro City on the Heidelberg-Hamburg line.
Chronic love racing
through the docile squares of fields
through Europe’s lingering infection
evil’s simplicity.

He.
Martin Heidegger
the Führer of philosophy.

He’d be a train as punctual
as faith’s ambiguity.

March. March. Long-distance march.
The fanatical complexity of passing stations.
Vaterland
under predestination’s stretched sail.

They.
Hannah Arendt
Martin Heidegger
died
without regaining death.

New volunteers
now stand along the platform
calling on the evidence of their luggage.

They carefully unpack their ideologies,
drowned by the noise of an ontological excavator
philosophy’s adoptive aunt.

Ewa Lipska is one of Poland’s most recognized living poets. Since 1967 she has authored over twenty books of poems, and volumes of her selected works have appeared in thirteen languages. In the 1990s she served as cultural liaison between Poland and Austria through her role as First Secretary of the Polish Embassy in Vienna. She has received numerous awards in Poland and abroad, including two from PEN and, in 1995, the Award of the City of Kraków, where she has returned to live. (2009)

Clare Cavanagh is a specialist in modern Russian and Polish poetry. She has won numerous awards for her translation of Polish poetry and is currently working on a biography of the poet Czesław Miłosz. (2010)