Firing Neurons
A6 32pp ISBN 0-978-0-9807718-4-8
$9.90 including postage
Barbara Orlowska-Westwood speaks from her experience and those of her Polish family in this sure, personal and political work. She writes about her childhood and her family’s life in Poland during the Second World War and later under the communist regime.
A number of those poems have been published in journals in Australia (Ulitarra, Hecate, First Edition, Verandah, The Mozzie), some in USA (Red Weather) and in anthologies (Disarmed/Poems on Peace) in Australia and in Poland (Billabong, Poezja Australijska).
Her medical past and dealing with people’s emotions are often reflected in her writing. Poems in this collection such as ‘Why’, ‘An Ancient Coin’, ‘Changing Colour’, ‘Wedge’ and ‘Visit’ appeared in Centoria, Woorilla, Scant Journal/Girls Only Issue, and anthologies (Suburbs of the Mind, Blue Like Tea, Said the Rat).
Orlowska-Westwood also writes about Australian landscape and environmental issues. Her poem ‘Nature of Things’ won the 2002 DUSA Poetry Award and was published in the journal Verandah. The poem, ‘Frogs’, was published in an anthology Earth Works.
As a bilingual writer she has taken part in Polish cultural events in Melbourne performing her work at the Malt House Theatre and The Art Gallery.
In 1999 she was selected for the bilingual writers’ program FlightPath, supported by the Victorian Writers Centre and Footscray Community Art Centre. The performance, In Transit, was part of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.
Lazarus
For my father and those murdered in Katyn Forest*
You were there
among thousands of others
in that lost battle
Wounded, taken prisoner
herded into the cattle train
driven towards Katyn
'Bolsheviks, they kill Polish
officers,' somebody said
he knew, he was in the Revolution
You wanted to live
you wanted to fight
you escaped
Hunted in the foreign land
among the enemy
and unknown friends
...killed in the battle…
...lost in action...
…shot during escape...
They listened, they cried
your wife, your parents
your five-year-old daughter
There was no grave
to take flowers
to leave tears
On that day
when you knocked on the door
we had no tears to cry
no words to say
only hands to touch
only arms to hold you
our Lazarus
*Katyn Forest - the place in Russia, where over 4,300 Polish officers taken prisoners in 1939, were killed in 1940 by the Soviet Secret Police.
