Five minutes after the air raid

Five minutes after the air raid

By Miroslav Holub  

Translated by George Theiner

In Pilsen,
twenty-six Station Road,
she climbed to the third floor
up stairs which were all that was left
of the whole house,
she opened her door
full on to the sky,
stood gaping over the edge.

For this was the place
the world ended.

Then
she locked up carefully
lest someone steal
Sirius
or Aldebaran
from her kitchen,
went back downstairs
and settled herself
to wait
for the house to rise again
and for her husband to rise from the ashes
and for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in place.

In the morning they found her
still as stone,
sparrows pecking her hands.

Miroslav Holub was a curious mixture, perhaps a unique one: he was one of  Czech Republic’s  most prolific and original poets and also a distinguished scientist, a leading immunologist. What makes Holub so unusual is his distinction in both fields. Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere", says Ted Hughes. "One of the sanest voices of our time”, writes A. Alvarez in an introduction. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. He loved experimental poetry and wrote free and irregular verses. "I prefer to write for people untouched by poetry," he said in an interview.

"Five Minutes After the air Raid", is a poignant and nostalgic evocation of a woman who loses everything after her home and family are destroyed by a bomb. The poem skillfully balances the use of a factual journalistic tone with striking and at times shocking imagery, which combined evoke strong reactions in the reader. The encompassing sensation of horror and tragedy are profoundly characteristic of Holub's entire oeuvre and his poetic style.

It begins with the plainest of physical descriptions:

"   In Pilsen,
   twenty-six Station Road,
   she climbed to the third floor
   up stairs which were all that was left
   of the whole house,

   she opened the door
   full on to the sky,
   stood gaping over the edge."

One minute the woman appears to be on solid ground, making her everyday ascent to her home Upon opening the same door she has opened many times before she is met with a shockingly different world to the one familiar to her. She is simply gaping into the open sky putting herself on the peril of falling down. This move from certainty to uncertainty in this poem is amazingly swift. No sooner have we taken the address on board than we are treading those free-standing stairs. What dreadful history do they suggest? Are they the hallucination of a damaged mind, or real wreckage? How can the climbing woman avoid further injury?
 
The buildings physical ruin directly reflects the woman's emotional state: "this was the place the world had ended". These lines demonstrate the fragility of human existence, and it is telling that they are singular and separate from the rest of the poem, creating a gap, between the first stanza of the poem, and the rest, its purpose is to demonstrate the divide between the woman's old life, and that which follows the bomb. Holub is expressing that everything we know, everything we take for granted can be taken away in a single moment.

Holub reveals, the woman's disoriented mental state by having her perform an illogical action. She locks up the house. Why? There is nothing left to protect. Everything she had is gone, and Holub emphasizes this, by suggesting she is protecting.

"Sirius or Aldebaran"

They are the two brightest and most precious stars in the sky. Perhaps those are the stars she thought only she had the luck of feasting every day from her kitchen. Now that the house is gone, her deranged mind thinks that someone can steal those stars she had cherished as her own delight.

She is expecting the impossible at the end. She "went back downstairs / and settled herself / to wait / for the house to rise again / and for her husband to rise from the ashes / and for her children's hands and feet to be stuck in place. / In the morning they found her / still as stone, / sparrows pecking her hands." She is mentally deranged now. Her physical presence is there like a stone. But the mind is gone!

This is one of the saddest and deeply moving poems I have read in recent times.