I'm a poet!

I was 6 or 7 when Grandma bought me Płomyczek. A magazine for kids more or less my age. The first such publication I have ever seen, one of the few published in the then socialist Poland.

I couldn’t tear myself away. Read each article countless times, solved all the puzzles, coloured every picture that wasn’t colourful already. Couldn’t wait for the next one, due in two weeks.

The third or fourth Płomyczek I managed to lay my hands on had a new column. Poems submitted by readers. Real pieces printed in a real magazine but imagined and written by kids like me.

My mind lit up like a supernova. I could write a poem! And they would publish it!

I loved words. I knew a lot of them. And I loved stories. Actually, the very first thing I did with the newly acquired skill of writing a few years earlier was to dig out a notebook with no scribbles inside (not an easy task, crayons were never far from my hands) and write down my own fairytale, just like the ones Grandma read to me every evening before bed. It had a princess, obviously very beautiful, and a prince, and love at first sight – everything a proper fairytale should have. I ran out of steam halfway through the story so married them off quickly. Made them live happily ever after, as they should.

Now was the time to level up and become a poet. How do I start?

‘Here comes the sled

carrying Ned.

And here is Ted

running after the sled!’

All of a sudden, I felt like a great demiurge, a creator of my own universe of rhythm and rhyme. What a joy! I bounced out of my chair and did a happy dance all over the room.

For the next few days, I spent every possible hour hunched over a notebook, pen in hand, searching for rhymes and counting syllables. Grandma watched with amusement. She was regularly consulted.

‘Nana! Nana, what rhymes with winter?’

‘Hmm, splinter…?’

‘No! Not a splinter, I need a happy word!’

I ran out of space in the notebook in two days. Grandma reviewed everything, added a few commas.

When my parents came home from work, I ran to show them my opus. Dad, seated in his usual armchair, looked up from the newspaper and raised a brow.

‘Well, well! I have a smart daughter!’

Mom turned the pages slowly, her face unreadable. Then she handed the notebook back to me and sighed heavily.

‘If only you spent that much time doing something actually useful…’

She turned to Grandma.

‘You’re giving the child ideas.’

All the ideas were mine, I wanted to say. Grandma only corrected the spelling.

But Mom hurried to the kitchen before I had a chance to speak. She had to warm up the dinner for Dad and herself.

Grandma chose three poems she thought were best. I added two more because I liked them.

Next thing to do was to compose a letter to the editor.

‘It’s a real magazine, journalists an’ all. The handwriting needs to be nice, not your usual “hen’s claw” style!’

Grandma often said that my handwriting looked as if a hen did it with her claw. She kept a few hens in an enclosure in the garden, for eggs. I often helped her feed them but have never seen any of the hens write anything. I didn’t think they knew how.

The letter was hard work that took a few hours. With every spelling mistake, every inkblot or crossed out word, Grandma made me take a new sheet and start again. My hand went numb by the time we were both satisfied. It was already dark outside but eight pages of my painstakingly perfected handwriting lay spread across my desk.

‘I’ll find a nice big envelope and we’ll take it to the post office tomorrow,’ Grandma promised.

As soon as my eyes snapped open in the morning, I jumped out of bed and dashed to the desk.

‘Nana! Nana, my letter! Where’s my letter?’

Grandma was bustling around her bedroom, smoothening the bed covers, brushing away crumbs from the table.

‘Erm… you don’t remember?’

Remember what?

‘You woke up very ill in the middle of the night. Threw up all over the place. The letter was damaged …’

I checked in with my body quickly, searched for signs of pain or queasiness. Strange.

‘I feel healthy.’

‘Yeah, good. But you were ill tonight. The letter had to be thrown away.’

She would not meet my eye.

The pang of disappointment stabbed me in the chest. What could we do now?

‘Nana, help me write the letter again!’

‘Yeah, sure… but not now. I have to feed the chickens.’

‘But later?’

‘Yeah, later.’

This day was busy for Grandma though. I reminded her time and again but she always had something else to do, somewhere else she needed to be.

After dinner, I got a candy for dessert. A rare treat. Sucking on its clammy sweetness, I strolled to the kitchen to get rid of the wrapper. The bin stood hidden from sight in a cabinet under the sink. I opened the door of the cabinet, looked down and froze.

The bin was half full, with just a fragment of a torn sheet of paper visible among other stuff. Something about it looked familiar. Holding the piece in two fingers, I raised it to the light.

My best handwriting.

I could see more pages underneath. No traces of vomit on any of them. The usual, papery smell. They were just crumpled, nothing else.

There were no thoughts in my head, just one big question mark. What was this all about? Something felt wrong. Terribly, painfully wrong.

Then I heard footsteps. And felt afraid all of a sudden, as if I did something wrong. Taking care not to make a sound, I closed the cabinet quickly and jumped away from it.

‘There you are!’ Mom appeared in the doorway. ‘Good. You’ll make yourself useful and do the dishes now.’

At this moment, in a split-second moment of revelation that went through my mind like a flash of lightning, I knew that my poems would never be seen in print. Knowledge sat heavily on my shoulders as I dipped the first plate in hot water.

I never mentioned the letter again.