Sleep Easy
Sleep easy, young Tadeus Makulski
Sleep easy, brave Zigmunt Kovacs too
Your torment of so many years is over
Sleep easy under English morning dew.
Continuing your fight against the enemy
High in foreign English cloudy sky
Not prepared to yield up your homeland
But avenge the Fates, if necessary, die.
Forsaking kith and kin in farms and factories
Abandoning your lifetime’s peaceful path
The transience of 45’s sweet victory
The sickening bile of Yalta’s aftermath.
Would you have offered such brave resistance
That sacrifice should bring reward so cruel
To free your land from the heel of Hitler
For 50 years to bow to Russian rule?
Divided and picked over through the centuries
By masters of the Volga and the Rhine
Between the German eagle and the Russian bear
A carcass of the Oder-Neisse line.
You have not fought and died in vain for Freedom
For Polska, for love of which you flew
Sleep easy, young Tadeus Makulski
Sleep easy, brave Zigmunt Kovacs too.
Perhaps your spirits feared to walk your homeland
But Poland now embraces freedoms new;
Do wideja, young Tadeus Makulski
Djekuya, brave Zigmunt Kovacs too
Dave Bradley
Sat 13th Nov 2010 15:52
Moving indeed. I was in Krakow in September and found an open air display on their liberation struggle fascinating and inspiring. A nearby memorial to the Katyn massacre was also very impressive, with its recent additions in respect of the awful plane crash in which so many of their leaders died, while trying to visit Katyn. But they keep bouncing back. I played table tennis this week against an all-Polish team of bus drivers here in Liverpool, and their spirit is definitely intact!