What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
Jerzy Ficowski
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz & Piotr Sommer
       In memory of Bruno Schulz

For so many years now
in my entresol of wooden beams
between the ceiling and the hall
25 watts of everlasting light
obscured by fly droppings glimmer
behind a barricade of old papers

There he is winding his watch
he doesn't brush away the spiders he sleeps

By now he must have deciphered every wood-knot
his still shadow overgrown by plaster
sometimes he's not there
even after curfew
he spends time in Hyderabad
unlocks the next knot
goes back further and further into the wood

Today my dream
knocked on wood for him

Mr. Bruno it's all right now
you can come down

But he waits for the unwaitforable
he cannot hear my dream
he, nobody
saner than anybody
he knows there's no entresol
nor light
nor me
from the book EVERYTHING I DON'T KNOW / World Poetry Books
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What Sparks Poetry: 
A Short List of Books Ilya Kaminsky Loved in 2021

"Jerzy Ficowski is perhaps best known for saving Bruno Schulz's legacy for us. The fact that he is also a great Polish poet in his own right is relatively unknown in the US. But Everything I Don't Know changes that. Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer's translations are a masterwork of clarity and precision."  
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