Foreword / Introduction
As announced by Staś in his previous post, this post is not shared by him, but the poem was written by him. I can’t confirm when, as I digitalized one of the many poems he has written down on paper in the years before he became part of our family, and there was no date on it. Based on the handwriting and grammatical errors, I would assume he wrote this poem when he was around 9 years old, though it’s difficult to say if I’m correct since Staś is a well-written boy who uses many words beyond his age.
The title includes “version 1” because this is one of several poems he wrote with the title “The Silent Child,” all of them sharing the common aspect of being about himself. The addition of “archive” should speak for itself.
Staś has been doing better and should be publishing himself in the coming days. However, this introduction marks the beginning of an “archive” series that I will be posting in his name. I’ve been allowed to go through his previously written poems and publish them here on his blog, regardless of any reluctance to share certain poems. This is to show sides of his work and himself that he might find difficult to share himself. I hope you enjoy.
A quick note: Staś wrote most of his early work in Polish, so that is how it will appear here in the future. I will provide English translations for every piece, but the poems definitely have a different weight to them if you understand the Polish language.
Poem: The Silent Child [narrative lyrical]
There is a boy who sits inside the glass,
he watches the heavy rain fall on the grass.
He does not speak a single word all day,
he only looks at things in a grey way.
His hands are small and cold upon the sill,
he stays so quiet, he is perfectly still.
I see him waiting when the lights go low,
but where he comes from, I do not know.
He wears a jumper that is slightly too big,
he watches the bird sitting on the twig.
The adults talk with voices loud and deep,
but the silent child does not make a peep.
He seems to listen to the sounds underneath,
like the wind whistling through the heath.
He has a secret locked inside his chest,
a heavy thing that never lets him rest.
He walks on tiptoes down the narrow hall,
he makes no shadow on the papered wall.
The floorboards creak but not beneath his feet,
he is a ghost upon the wooden seat.
He plays with blocks but builds no castle tall,
he only builds a thick and solid wall,
to hide behind when people come too near,
to block the noise that hurts his sensitive ear.
I found him hiding in the cupboard darkness,
away from the sharp and sudden starkness.
He looked at me with eyes like orange stones,
I felt the silence deep within my bones.
He did not cry, he did not ask for aid,
he sat alone in the fort he had made.
I wondered if he wanted to be found,
or if he preferred the silence all around.
The garden is a place he likes to go,
to watch the plants and flowers slowly grow.
He touches leaves with gentle fingertips,
but no sound ever escapes his sealed lips.
He sees the beetles marching in a line,
he thinks their armour is a grand design.
He understands the language of the ground,
where words are felt and never made of sound.
Sometimes he stands before the mirror tall,
but does not look at his own face at all.
He looks beyond the glass into the room,
as if he sees a monster in the gloom.
His mouth might open just a tiny crack,
but then the silence pulls the noise right back.
It steals the voice before it has a chance,
and leaves him locked in a quiet trance.
The dinner table is a lonely place,
he stares intently at the patterned lace.
The clatter of the forks is far too loud,
like thunder breaking from a storm cloud.
He eats his food with careful, slow intent,
as if his energy is already spent.
The others laugh and tell their stories bright,
he sits within his own separate night.
He has a box of treasures beneath his bed,
a smooth grey stone, a piece of cotton thread,
a feather dropped by a passing black crow,
things that the busy people do not know.
He counts them over when the house is sleep,
these are the promises he has to keep.
They do not judge him for his lack of speech,
they are the friends within his little reach.
I think he knows things that we do not see,
he knows the secrets of the ancient tree,
he knows why shadows stretch across the floor,
and what lies hidden behind the locked door.
His silence is not empty, it is full,
a heavy weight that has a constant pull.
It draws you in if you look in his eye,
but you must never ask the reason why.
The seasons change, the green turns into gold,
the silent child begins to feel the cold.
He wraps his arms around his skinny frame,
he does not answer to his given name.
He is a statue made of breathing bone,
he is a king upon a silent throne.
His kingdom is the corner of the room,
his subjects are the dust motes in the gloom.
One day he found a broken porcelain cup,
he did not try to pick the pieces up.
He looked at them as if they were his heart,
shattered and lying quiet and apart.
He traced the jagged edges with his thumb,
he felt the pain but remained completely numb.
It was a picture of his inner state,
a quiet acceptance of his silent fate.
The noise of traffic rumbles from the street,
he feels the tremor in the concrete sheet.
It shakes the silence that he tries to hold,
it makes him feel so very small and old.
He covers ears with hands so pale and thin,
to stop the chaos from rushing right in.
He wishes he could turn the volume down,
and silence every person in the town.
He writes his thoughts upon the foggy pane,
then wipes them out and starts it all again.
The words vanish before they can stay,
he prefers to let them fade away.
For written words can sometimes be too real,
they show the world exactly how you feel.
And he is scared to show the soft inside,
so he decides it is better to hide.
The adults worry and they talk in hushed tones,
about the child who feels like heavy stones.
They try to make him speak, they try to plead,
but silence is the only thing he needs.
They do not understand his world of quiet,
they think that life must be a noisy riot.
He looks at them with pity in his gaze,
lost in their loud and chaotic maze.
Perhaps one day the silence will explode,
and words will tumble down the dusty road.
Or maybe he will stay this way for good,
misunderstood, just like the dark wood.
The silent child is stronger than he seems,
he lives inside a world of vivid dreams,
where he can shout and sing and loudly cry,
beneath a vast and open purple sky.
So if you see him sitting on the stair,
pretend that you do not see him sitting there.
Just let him be, let him observe the show,
there are some things that we will never know.
The silent child is watching us today,
in his own quiet and mysterious way.
He is the question that has no reply,
the heavy cloud drifting in the sky.
