THUS WE SEE

A sixty-five year old man consulted me in 1986 complaining of a band of chest pain that two cardiologists had investigated without diagnosis. He was Polish and had been a prisoner in WWII and enslaved in a German coalmine in Silesia, starved and inadequately clothed. He described to me how as winter progressed, he and his fellow prisoners would wire the decaying pieces of their clothes together.  His shirt was reduced to a band of fabric around the middle of his chest.  His current chest pain was in the same anatomical zone as that covered forty-five years before by the remnants of his shirt.

Thus we see and sew and save

the triangular, square or without form,

colored bits of fabric, even love,

to keep us warm.

Thus we see

the landscape under snow,

‘the infected winter of our condition,’

and in seeing, know.

Thus we sew,

as freezing prisoners of war,

the remnants of the clothes we wear,

Dole. Too rough:

thread of repair is not enough

to make us whole.

Thus we save,

as lining for our trap,

flotsam rescued from the wave,

the storm, from life’s enthralling compromise –

worn and wet rags

to fill the gap –

we have only man’s eyes.