Newton's Orange — Web Exclusive
By Ewa Lipska
Translated by Margret Grebowicz
Gravity
I run into it
in the old market square.
Maybe in ancient Rome.
It wears
the sarcastic color
of a wasted life.
It laughs seconds out loud.
Sunflower seeds.
In its military memory
it harbors a changing of the guard.
It presses its ear against the moist ground.
The ticking pulse of approaching clock hands.
As it lies
under a ravaged tree
a human
falls on it.
Ewa Lipska was born in 1945 in Kraków. She is a Polish poet from the generation of the Polish "New Wave." Collections of her verse have been translated into English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, and Hungarian. She divides her time between Vienna and Kraków.
Margret Grebowicz specializes in feminist and critical race theories read through the lens of contemporary European thought. She is especially interested in the production of knowledge after modernity. She has published articles and book chapters on Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Donna Haraway, Antonio Negri, Emmanuel Levinas, Catherine MacKinnon, and Paul Feyerabend, among others. She is the editor of two anthologies, SciFi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction and Gender After Lyotard, the co-editor of Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections of the Work of June Jordan, and currently at work on a co-authored book on the recent work of Donna Haraway, to be published by Columbia University Press. She is also an active literary translator from her native Polish.
Original text: Ewa Lipska, Pomarancza Neivtona. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007.