A Repetition

I was in this room once before.
I talked to the same woman, watched her shiny necklace
and drunk tea from the same cup.

I know exactly at which moment we’ll say to each other:
Good night! How many minutes I’ll be falling asleep and what we’ll later
dream about...

I was in this room once before!
For unexplained reasons, they have forgotten to limit my memory.
Is it possible that someone hoped that this time I would act differently?

Change the course of events, mend the world’s history? But joyfully I...
repeat myself. It is a wonderful, earthly evening.
Intimate and common.

I’d like to live it through endlessly.
Without any changes.
 

Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. Since 1985 lives in Copenhagen. He has published seven volumes of poetry in Poland, three (translations) in Denmark, and selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mostar 2002). He is also the author of several plays. English translations of his poems have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Chicago Review, Lyric Poetry Review, Eclectica Magazine, 3rd bed (USA) and in anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004).