Weronika Trzebiatowska

1843 Nierostowo - 1899 Winona

I wanted only to be a wife and mother,
Nesting with my mate and our flock
Along the gorgeous lake Nierostowo.

My first husband died, leaving me with two boys;
My second gave me ten more children.
In time we fourteen began to starve
In lovely Nierostowo, and I cannot deny that.
Yet I wanted to stay with my home and ancestral fields
Ancestral cemetery, and ancestral church.
Instead, we packed up what we had left
And rode a creaking wagon to Chojnice,
Where we were packed into one of many
Cramped, reeking, airless wagons drawn by
A black, smoking, screaming iron monster,
Which frightened me to death
And dragged us to a dockside Bremen hovel.
We were fed there to an even bigger iron monster,
Riding the storms out in its putrid creaking guts
Throwing up the awful salt pork we were fed
To be vomited out ourselves three weeks later,
Into a faster, louder, uglier American train
Which took us "home" to Winona.
Even there the trains would not leave me be
Screaming outside my windows, day and night
Rattling my cupboards and coating my house in soot
To remind me I would never see Nierostowo again.
Home: no more glades or meadows,
No more harvest festivals or courtships
Just gas lights and grocery stores,
Newspapers and politics, public schools and streetcars;
Fourteen people crammed into two tiny rooms
With the trains, always the trains, screaming,
Taunting me about my lost Nierostowo.
Once the children had left, I left too.
Out the back door I walked, on to the tracks
And into the path of a Milwaukee Road limited.
The papers said I was mad, but I thought it most fitting:
I knew the train would kill me eventually.

905 East King Street