Translated from the Polish by David Curzon and Graźyna Drabik
Those who carry grand pianos
to the tenth floorwardrobes and coffins
the old man with a bundle of wood hobbling beyond the horizon
the woman with a hump of nettles
the lunatic pushing her baby carriage
full of empty vodka bottles
they all will be raised up
like a seagull featherlike a dry leaf
like eggshellscraps of street newspapers
Blessed are those who carry
for they will be raised
My favorite lines in Fiddler on the Roof are the question Motel the tailor asks the rabbi upon receiving a longed-for sewing machine, and the rabbi’s response:
“Rabbi, is there a blessing for a sewing machine?”
“There is a blessing for everything.”
Blessing is a liturgical act, a spoken prayer—usually in the mysterious subjunctive—and also a way of seeing and responding that imparts as it witnesses. It is an attitude, like the “quality of mercy,” which “blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
Anna Kamienska’s blessing for “those who carry” draws a wide frame around a class of people we might not think to “lift up” for reverent attention or to see in terms of the hope we share with them rather than in terms, less generous, of mere pity. The lively, surprising specificity with which the speaker recognizes their efforts and their burdens, and compares them to other stray and ragged things that are “rasied up” invites us to pause over each with an admiration we might not otherwise feel. Kamienska, a Polish Catholic, knew the lives of burdened people: growing up in Nazi-occupied Poland, she taught in underground schools, wrote and watched and commemorated those whose fates could only be imagined. Appreciation requires imagination—a particular gift Kamienska brings to her work, written in the thick of World War II and in its long aftermath.
“Those who carry grand pianos,” for instance, brings to my mind the huge, sweating, muscular young man who strapped our piano to his back and carried it down two flights of hillside steps to our door. He worked for a moving company staffed and supported by a thriving program for people recovering from addiction. Adhering to their rules, he accepted no tips—only a glass of cold water for his efforts. He was cheerful. That his unusual strength equipped him for service seemed to give him great satisfaction. He spoke with candor about rehab and with gratitude about having a job. He blessed us with more than a safely ensconced piano that day. That was some years ago, and until I read this poem, I’d had little occasion to remember him. Remembering him is a reminder of what recovery requires, and of how many are quietly walking that hard road a day at a time.
Those who carry coffins also walk a hard road—short and ceremonial, but paved with sorrow. They’re usually the hardy sons or grandsons of the deceased—or nephews or devoted former students returned to pay respects. They are among the living whose health and strength seem almost jarring so closely adjacent to the dead. The physical weight of the coffin and the body of someone known and loved, hugged and held, whose familiar hands lie crossed and still, add a palpable dimension to loss and make the pallbearers representatives for the rest of us who watch them make their slow way along the route of the final journey. For some young people, it’s a defining moment as they age into awareness of mortality.
Older people who have lived with that deepening awareness for many years may bear their daily burdens in intimate proximity to death. Like “the old man with a bundle of wood hobbling beyond the horizon,” those who know the ache of aging bodies also know that they make a challenge of what might once have been simply and thoughtlessly accomplished. And the old woman carrying nettles for tea or medicine has gathered them, no doubt, at some cost to the modest reserve of daily energy required for survival. To see what they carry and to bless them as they go is to cultivate a solidarity that keeps us humanely aware that our times are in God’s hands and that we are called, like Shakespeare’s Gloucester, to endure our “going hence even as our coming hither.”
Even “the lunatic pushing her baby carriage / full of empty vodka bottles” offers, and deserves, blessing. The neediest, the most helpless, the most lost among us offer outward and visible signs of all our brokenness, reminders to keep our hearts open rather than recoil—to engage the homeless person on the street corner, or the one who suffers from mental illness, in a simple exchange, to ask him or her a question, to look past an alcoholic haze to a chronic pain, aching and unassuaged, that deserves and calls forth blessing.
The list of “those who carry” is small and unassuming in this poem, which models the humility of which it speaks. But in it we’re reminded to see those around us in terms of what they carry—what’s borne in aging bodies and troubled minds and aching hearts—and to see ourselves in them.
“They will be raised,” the speaker finally assures us, choosing a word resonant with biblical promise that also describes what happens when the merest breeze lifts a feather or scrap of paper and lets it float, as we all must, on currents that carry us in ways we can neither will nor resist. The assurance is a benediction, a postscript to the Beatitudes, an assurance of the happiness that can come only from grace, and will come to all of us who are invited to cast our cares on the One who cares for us and, one day, to lay our burdens down at the feet of God, perhaps to discover that God carried the bulk of them all along.