When I express concern that

     war is breaking out,

my dad tells me not to worry.

There’s always war somewhere –

wojna zawsze gdzieś się toczy.
We walk through the dark,

     my dad and I.

He carries a knife in his sock.

There are dangerous dogs

     where we walk,

but he keeps to his way.
Zawsze zabijają się nawzajem –

someone is always killing someone, he says,

     and if I respond with a shock,

he says that there is always tragedy.

Niech inni opłakują –

     let others

          do the mourning.
Our path stays the same.

     The dogs bark.

Someone yells from a car, while

we walk through the dark.
We go after sunset

     between rows

          of orange-brick,

          post-World War II

     bungalows.

My dad calls the suburbs, sypialnie

– the bedrooms.

We are asleep too: between the houses,

we haunt our own corridors.
My dad and I, we don’t walk arm in arm,

     but I do step in step with him.

Pools of electric light

     and cosmic darkness

          glide over us.

Here is the divine moment.

Here is sacred thought.
There is always a fight somewhere, it seems.

Even here, while we walk,

we are quietly,

     almost imperceptibly,

          at war.