Moje, or Mine, Earliest Writings

After my mother died, I went through her belongings. In an ornamental, wooden box, tucked among her precious cooking recipes and what I took to be my father’s love letters (he was not a man of great sentiment), I found a small, green-covered notebook, a zeszycik do słówek, as we called it in school, the kind used for vocabulary drills.

Its pages were filled with handwritten poems. My poems.

I remembered writing them, vaguely: the lined pages, the fading blue ink, the care with which I copied each stanza. But I never imagined they had survived. To find them there, among the things my mother had chosen to keep, startled me. It felt like being seen after all, even appreciated by someone who had never acknowledged it.

I must have been ten, maybe nine. The poems had rhyme, meter, even a sense of gravity, as though I was already worried about the weight of the world.

One tells the story of an old man, a beggar, who thinks he hears a coin rolling down a rough street. It is his dream, his hope:

That makes the heart to miss a beat

That dries the throat before a shout,

Yet in the end, the hope dissolves:

But what is this? Not coin, not sound,

No ringing bright or clear;

Just a holed disc that spins around,

The old man’s dream held dear.

I have included the poem, in my own translation, in Curiosity, a collection of short stories that gathers both my earliest and later attempts at writing. It isn’t meant as proof or confession. Just a record. A look across decades of storytelling.