The End and the Beginning – Reviewed
Translated from Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
You may find the rest of the poem here.
Poem for the end of a war
© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
Analysis
Wars don’t end when the fighting stops. The destruction doesn’t disappear overnight. Someone has to clear the wreckage, haul away the dead, and put everything back together. The End and the Beginning focuses on this part—the quiet, exhausting labor of rebuilding. It’s the part that never makes it into history books because there’s nothing dramatic about it. No victories, no heroes, just endless work that no one wants to think about.
The poem begins with a simple fact: after every war, someone has to clean up. The lines are short and direct, listing task after task like a never-ending to-do list. Rubble needs moving, bodies need clearing, broken things need fixing. The work is repetitive, slow, and ugly. Someone has to wade through the filth, scrape away the grime, replace shattered windows, and drag in beams to hold up crumbling walls. But no one is watching. The cameras have already moved on to the next war.
The speaker isn’t emotional about any of this. The tone is matter-of-fact, almost detached. The work itself is the focus, not the people doing it. No one in the poem is named because it doesn’t matter who they are. What matters is that this happens every time, and it always falls to someone. The war might be over, but that doesn’t mean things are fine. The destruction lingers, and so do the people who remember it. But even they won’t last forever.
The middle of the poem shifts from cleaning up to rebuilding. The bridges and railways need to be repaired. The streets need to be cleared. The people doing this work still remember the war, but new people are already arriving, people who weren’t there, people who don’t care. They find it boring. The past starts to fade.
Even the arguments that once mattered so much get tossed aside like rusted junk. The causes and effects of the war become irrelevant. The people who lived through it step aside for those who know little, then less, then nothing at all. It’s not just the war itself that disappears—it’s the memory of it.
By the end, the battlefield is covered in grass. The war has been erased. The last image is of someone lying in the grass, watching the clouds, completely unaware of what happened beneath him. He has the luxury of not knowing. The cycle is complete. Until the next war starts.
Photo by Jean-Pierre Brungs on Unsplash
