White Chairs by Krystyna Dąbrowska
women and men climb up on them to see each other over the partition.
White Chairs
by Krystyna Dąbrowska
translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik
Let ordinariness in poetry be like the white plastic chairs by the Wailing Wall. In them, not in showy armchairs, the old rabbis pray, foreheads touching the wall’s stone. Regular plastic chairs— women and men climb up on them to see each other over the partition. And the mother of a boy celebrating his bar mitzvah steps onto a chair and showers her son with candies as he bids childhood good- bye. Let ordinariness in poetry be like these chairs, which vanish to make room for a circle dance on the Sabbath.
First Published in The Southern Review (Winter 2019)





You read poems like this, and remember why you chose poetry in the first place.