황새들

By 1900 there was no Poland on any map. The country had been partitioned among its neighbours for over a century, and painters like Józef Chełmoński kept a sense of it alive on canvas instead. He had spent years in Munich and Paris, then came home to a village in Mazovia to paint the countryside he grew up in. Here a farmer and a small boy stop their plowing to look up. A ragged line of storks is crossing the pale spring sky, birds that leave Poland each autumn and return every year without fail. The plough still stands in the furrow behind them. Storks were the bird every Polish village welcomed back, nesting on rooftops and chimneys as a sign of luck and home.