The poem was inspired by a testimony taken from The Dictionary of War by Ostap Slyvynsky.
In the testimony we read about the 10th day of the defense of Mariupol when the soldiers were collecting every piece of wood that could be used to warm people.
Suddenly an elderly woman rushed out of the tenement house where she and the narrator lived. She started screaming that she would not let cut down her cherry plum, which nobody was planning to do anyway.
From then on an elderly woman began to guard the tree so that nobody would touch it.
In the morning after an unusually cold night the narrator of the testimony saw an elderly woman lying by the tree.
In order to commemorate this elderly woman Krzysztof Czyżewski wrote a poem and planted himself a cherry plum in his garden.
This inspired a lot of other people to do the same. Several people in Poland and out of Poland are planting a cherry plum to pay tribute to the woman from Mariupol, to all the people who lost their lives after the Russian invasion and to Mariupol itself.
Besides the beautiful act of commemorating the woman and the city, Krzysztof Czyżewski and so many other people following him have done what the old masters and old wisdom teach about the trying times: when the world ends, plant the tree.
The English translation of ‘ poem is found below:
beautiful
elderly woman in a courtyard of Mariupol
shelters a cherry plum with the shreds of her life
winter was coming night took any firewood
into her tree she grew with the cry of resistance
I wake up in the morning at the very dawn
I look out the window and she is still there
by the tree but now lying on the ground
death has cut her down
but hasn’t touched the tree
your heart just can’t embrace some things
I have planted a cherry plum in my garden
maybe someone will plant it at home too
it is said to take root well in Poland
its plums have cherries its old age is young
our neighbor… I didn’t even ask later what happened to her
to death with the war
she plants cherry plums in us
[Italicized lines are quotes from the story of Wika from Mariupol, included in The Dictionary of War, collected by Ostap Sływynski and published in Polish by the Borderland Foundation, 2023.]
translated by Paweł Rogala, translation supervised by Krzysztof Czyżewski