Elizabeth Clark Reiss, REFLECTIONS
Once in a while, one is surprised with an unexpected gift. Our mother gave us such a gift. Unfortunately, when we received it, we could not thank her or discuss its meaning with her, as she was already dead. We don't even know if she planned it that way or whether the gift was even intended for us. Maybe we could not have understood or appreciated it before, as it revealed to us the depth of her life's two great passions before we became the center of her attention. If only we had received her gift before ....
I think we knew that she loved poetry but never considered that she might be a poet. The gift she was to give was her poetry, perhaps never intended for anyone but herself and our father. Even he, however, would never have read some her most beautiful poems because they could only have been written after his death.
To understand, let us tell you of a little of her life. Our mother was born in 1908 into a modest family in Watertown, New York. She left home at aged 17 to study English literature, first at Syracuse University and then at the University of Wisconsin where she received her Master's degree. It was also there that she first became interested in Slavic languages and the possibility of pursuing her studies in Poland. To make that possible, she spent the next year at the University of California studying with George Noyes, a foremost authority on Polish language and literature. Subsequently, she left for Poland to study at the ancient and renowned Jagellonian University of Kraków under the sponsorship of the Kosciusko Foundation. What was intended to be a one or two year program prior completion of a PhD program in the United States evolved into a love affair with Poland, its cultural life, and most importantly with a fellow student. She determined that her future was in Poland and she began to establish roots in a new homeland. After marriage to our father, world events changed all of their plans. He had become a musicologist and journalist assigned to cover the New York's World's Fair of 1939, while visiting the United States, where their first son, Robert, was to be born. The invasion of Poland and the start of World War II precluded their return to Poland.
After again taking up his journalistic career with a Polish language newspaper in New York, and shortly after the birth of their second son, Stefan, their life was again turned upside down. In 1941 he developed multiple sclerosis and shortly thereafter became home bound. To support her young family, our mother found employment as Senior Translator for the Polish Review, a literary and cultural publication of the Polish Government in Exile, but then changed the direction of her professional life and accepted the position of Assistant Executive Director of the newly formed American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, a coordinating body for the host of voluntary agencies dedicated to humanitarian relief in war-torn Europe and Asia. While my father continued to maintain some of their contacts with the expatriate Polish cultural community, it appeared to us that aside from caring for our family, our mother's professional responsibilities were all consuming. It is that woman that we knew as our mother during our childhood and thereafter. Our father died in 1958, but aside from continuing to maintain that she was always a married woman until her death, she never gave us to understand the passion with which she loved our father and the life they had both left behind in Poland.
Following her death in 2001, we were faced with the task of disposing of their rather extensive library of Polish books and literary periodicals as gifts to the Universities of California and North Carolina and her historical records of the now defunct American Council to Rutgers University. Among all of the above material, we discovered the poetry she had written in pen or pencil to my father in the years immediately following his death. We also found war-time patriotic poems expressing her love of and hopes for her occupied Poland, together with her translations of patriotic works by famous expatriate Polish poets written during the war and published by her in the Polish Review. This unexpected gift to us introduced the passionate and talented woman we never fully knew as our mother. It is also the gift that we would like to share with you.
It is important to understand that when organizing these poems into their two sections and giving them their titles, we attempted to follow our mother's notes. As part of our preface, we have included her poem “Of the Infinite”. The first section of this small collection is entitled “Cracovienne” and contains love poems, most in sonnet form, that recall her memories of our father and their life together in Poland. The second section is entitled “Lord, Poland Keep”, and contains two of her original war-time poems and above-mentioned translations of patriot works.
Robert and Stefan Reiss, New York, 2017
FORWARD
Sir Philip turned to the masters of his day
When he, constrained to put his love in verse,
Sought models for his songs, and did rehearse
The alexandrine line, the Chaucerian lay,
The honied conceits and inventions fair. -
Yet one by one, he laid them all aside
As lacking truth, and with his love to guide,
Looked into his heart, and found the fit verse there.
You are not Stella, nor I Astrophel,
Only our love the same, yet I would write
With such fit words. The poets of today
With unrhymed and unmetered verses, fail
As models here. And, as Sir Philip might,
I read my heart, and with the sonnet stay.
HOLY WEEK
After you died, I struggled to recall
The days preceding. The first day before
Reliving full, I am soon accounted for
Each small event, each word we spoke, and all
The suddenly important nothings that befall
Men commonly. Then, past the closing door,
I moved to the second day, its treasured store,
Jewels for remembrance, seeking to enthrall.
And to the third and fourth, each dimming fast,
Till I could no more capture, as I sought,
The further moments of those final hours, -
So the Apostles, Crucifixion past,
Must have endeavored, in some mighty thought
His days to recapture, for their world and ours.
Elizabeth Clark Reiss, unpublished, c1960
HOW CAN I STAND ALONE?
How can I stand alone? So long, my dear,
We shared a single life, as in a shell
The two parts of a nut close-lying dwell,
Or as two eyes which single-visioned peer
From out a face. By what analogy
Can I explain our oneness? Words alone
Cannot express the concept two made one.
Two separate parts, a single entity.
How can I stand alone? The ancient rite
Which sentenced widow at the husband's death
Perhaps the kindest, if they loved as we.
I am not one but half. I am not free,
I cannot act, I cannot draw full breath,
Alone, half here, half lost in blackest night.
I CANNOT SEE YOU
My eyes are my betrayers. Unlike all
The other senses, they refuse to serve
My love. I close my eyes and every nerve
Rejoices in your touch - how gently fall
Your hands upon my head! At times you call
Endearingly my name. My lips preserve
The savor of your kiss, and in the curve
Of shoulder where my face rests, I recall
The comforting scent of you so close to me,
Close as we ever were, thanks to these four
Most faithful senses! All but my blinded eyes.
Dear Presence that I feel but cannot see
Entreat for me that I might see once more,
Pray me un-blinded - if the prayer be wise.
ALCHEMY
We two were one. But now you're gone and I
Remain. (And yet if we were truly one,
Then only half remains, and half is gone.)
When we were one, those many years gone by
Our thoughts, our minds were intermingled so,
My thoughts lived in you, as your thoughts in me,
Our minds and souls, by some sweet alchemy,
Confluent were, in perfect interflow.
But half is gone and only half remains.
And that half lives. Your thought, your mind, your soul
Remain within the living half, and mine
While gone with you, the living half retains.
And yet somewhere your spirit keeps the whole
Till once more fused by alchemy divine.
MEETING IN CLASS
We often laughed about it later. I,
Newly arrived, an alien student, sat
Huddled in first row alone, to try
To catch the unfamiliar phrases. That
I was conspicuous, I knew. (For who
Sits in front row at college!) Still you came,
Sat down beside me, and the whole class through,
In whispering words and signs you sought my name.
I felt all eyes upon me. Blushing now,
To silence you, I wrote it in a book.
You marveled: whence I came, and why, and how.
I knew not what your words meant, but your look
Translating, vexedly I cast about,
Wondering, my love, why you should seek me out!
RENDEZ-VOUS
Do you recall that other meeting when
We failed to meet? "Wait in the market square
Beneath the clock," you said, and added then -
Or so I thought, "Precisely at two be there!"
(You could not wait - you had to go someplace.)
Precisely at two I hurried to the spot.
You were not there, I looked, but not a trace!
Had I mistaken time, or place forgot!
I never knew. Returning breathless home,
Breathless and lost, I waited till you came.
Angry that I had not appeared, you would
Not listen. Dearest, again I have become
A wanderer, lost in time and place the same
As then, - and I would meet you if I could!
LANGUAGE
Slowly I learned your language. As a child
You taught me, word by patient word, until
The barrier overcome, I spoke at will
With you in your own tongue. No more exiled
My mind from yours, our thoughts and dreams we shared,
Recounted tales of times before we met,
Breathlessly, lest we suddenly forget
Some minute detail, experiences compared.
Caught up in time, we easily conversed
On common matters; daily were attuned
Each to the other, found that we communed
Wordless again - and so was speech reversed.
But dearest, through what subtle language now
Can our minds meet? Our souls with speech endow?
CHAPEL IN THE SNOW
Tonight it's snowing, as that night it did
So many mile, so many years ago.
The city streets are frosted, buildings hid,
The bitter cold has gentled with the snow.
And now, as then, I taste the freshening air. -
("Before the Capuchin Chapel let us meet,"
You'd said, and I had promised to be there.
Breathless, I hurry down the snow-swept street
And at the corner turn, The chapel low,
Grey in the lamplight, beckons through the trees,
The Chapel Virgin, gossamered in snow,
Waits in the garden, pondering mysteries
I see you there. ..) For the first time I knew
My love, my life was heaven-pledged to you.
FULL PORTRAIT
The tales you told of times before we met,
People you knew, experiences great and small,
The events that made you often I recall,
The sum of these upon the known you set,
That knowing, I might know you better yet.
You were a man when our lives crossed, and all
Of joy and pain that earlier did befall
You thus was hid, till generously you let
The curtain lift on scenes of childhood, youth -
I ponder these scenes now - varied role
They played in making you the man I knew.
Each small kaleidoscopic bit brings truth,
Falls into place to make the portrait whole.
The well-loved portrait that I have of you.
DEAREST, YOU TOLD ME ONCE HOW ONE
CHRISTMAS LONG AGO ...
You were but a child yourself
The day was Christmas eve
The weather had turned cold
Your younger brother, Richard, six years old.
A moment unobserved, had slipped away.
Out of the house and down into the gray
Dusk of the city streets.
You had been told to care for him.
Oh, would your mother scold?
Where had he gone?
What would your father say?
The hours passed.
Your brother was not well.
Often he fell in faint.
Was he faint now?
Fallen in some cold place?
Half of the night they searched.
You waited numbly in the spell of fear.
At dawn they found him - well.
But how can Christmas ever again for you be bright?
UNDERSTANDING
Remember? When my father died, you wept,
Although before, you'd felt that he had borne
Some animosity toward you. You'd kept
A balance sheet of wrongs. But now, forlorn,
You wept. Too late, you cried he never knew
That truly you had counted him a friend -
Remember how I sought to comfort you?
"It's only now that he can comprehend!"
"Only when man puts off mortality,
Closes his human eyes and seals his ears,
His spiritual mind at last can clearly see,
His quickened soul at last divinely hears."
My dearest, now that mind, that soul command
In turn, this troubled heart to understand.
TWO SMALL BOYS (Left Unfinished)
Two small boys - brothers - one older by a year
That's you. There is a photo somewhere that
You showed me once.
In sailor suits and hat,
Posed for the picture, solemn you appear
Two little cherubs cast in mortal form.
Two little brothers, standing side by side -
This I remember when .....
LORD, POLAND KEEP (Unfinished Draft)
The silent stretch of plain
The sunrise red with blood
The ribboned Dnieper's flood
Its gilded waters stain
Cherson* village in shroud
The steeple cross from on high
Built to surmount the sky
Felled by a godless crowd
City wall in the dawn's aglow
Wild eyed Mongolian face
Measures a crimson pace
Bloodied in human woe,
From dungeon to heaven's gate
Above the sea breeze floods
Softly the prayerful notes,
Of the hymn "Lord Poland Keep"
Unpublished Draft, No date.
https://polishamericanstudies.org/files/public/reflections.pdf