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October Sky

Teaching the Holocaust and other Genocides

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October Sky

October was beautiful. As if it were yesterday I remember
the strangely clear, strangely deep sky
shimmering in the noon heat as a leaf shimmers in the wind,
empty and unreachable. I am oddly melancholy
telling you about this, for what do words mean?
I saw the lines of smoke the wind traced on the elusive sky
and I waited for the moment
when this unreachable sky would lean toward them
to absorb them. After that there is nothing but
the poet’s sadness and a subject for a poem.

And once I saw the sky through windowpanes.
We had just been ordered to open the windows in the blockhouse
and walking by I saw the sky in the glass,
unexpected and wonderful, as if it were
a great camp. Posts stapled with wire,
roads I know so well, were suspended in air
and the grass sparkled in the glass of the windowpane
dark green, as from the bottom of a lake. A red flame moved
across the sky and glistened on the grass in a russet stream.
Above this sky, a sky covered with smoke,
another sky hung clear and empty
and the smoke of the first sky drowned in the second.

And I realized that I didn’t know anything for certain,
that the earth and all that happens around me
are only a glass pane for someone else’s eyes.
Then someone blurred the picture and closed the window.
A moment long gone. The earth is real, and now I know
how real human suffering is.
But as a wave to shore, a moment of doubt returns
still, today, it still pierces me,
and always when I look at the December clouds
I see above them the October sky.

                                                                        -Tadeusz Borowski, 1941

Source: Borowski, Tadeusz. "Poetry of Tadeusz Borowski."  https://poetryoftadeuszborowski.wordpress.com/october-sky-poem/

Guiding Questions:

1.      There are two dimensions of the October Sky: how does the speaker define each?

2.      The speaker remembers that the sky was “empty and unreachable,” Yet, in the present, what will that “elusive” sky do that differs from his initial
         perceptions?

3.      The speaker once saw reflections in a windowpane he had opened – what was “surprising and wonderful” while also providing a moment of
         respite?

4.      This rare moment is accompanied by anther reflection.  How does this image negate the beauty of the first image?

5.      The glass pane becomes an important metaphor for the speaker’s confinement and illusory views of reality. How does the pane function as a
         reflection of nature, human suffering, confinement, and obscured perspectives?

6.      Does the October sky in the poem’s last two lines provide an opportunity for transcendence? How do these lines add to the speaker’s overall
         ambivalence?