funeral

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was born in September. She writes and sings, and studies at the faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. She gets involved against industrial farming, inequalities and climate change. She believes in political art. She lives in the Bielany district of Warsaw.

to dust you won’t return
not quite
to keep watch we’ll post a guard
of armored roses, fortified tombs
to send you off a submarine
to send you off a diving suit

sister fly, brother beetle
mother clay, father rain
we return to you your child
with this plastic wreath

this dialogue of polymers with death
this human forever and ever amen

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Author’s commentary:

My cousin is dead, and I hardly knew him. He lived and loved and died without me. And now the sun is shining, and everyone’s muttering Hail Marys. My mum and I bought individual roses, but they were bound with a silver ribbon, which I was too embarrassed to remove in public. In any case, what does it matter given all the wreaths of green latex, polyester, or some other substance whose name I don’t even know, though I come into contact with it more often than I do, say, with a giraffe.

Translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik

Ida Dzik:

was born in September. She writes and sings, and studies at the faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. She gets involved against industrial farming, inequalities and climate change. She believes in political art. She lives in the Bielany district of Warsaw.

Translation: Karen Kovacik

Publish date: 28.10.2020

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Paulina Olszanka:

APolish-Australian journalist with political and anthropological inclinations. She also works in research.

Coming to Poland as a child was to always encounter life as a different proposition – a world of strange melancholias and lofty metaphysics. There was nothing spookier, nor truer, than going down to the cemetery for All Saints’ Day, to lay a candle on the graves of loved ones; to be left in the silence of flickering lights and falling leaves, and to remember not only those gone, but ourselves too. It has always struck me as something that we could all learn from, a way to put death, or loss, in its place.

Death is, after all, what anthropologists understand to be the great ‘other’, something that we must all have a cosmological answer for. All Saints’, in the Catholic iteration, was created in the 7th century by Pope Boniface IV in honour of the Christian martyrs persecuted by Rome, but the roots of the ritual lie in a deeper consideration. In the pagan rites that preceded the holy day, death was something that needed to be warded off and managed, not just mourned.

Author’s commentary:

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Reconciliation by Light

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