AUTHOR'S NOTE:

I wrote “Warsaw” while studying in the Czech Republic, where I made many Polish friends. Their stories about growing up staunchly Catholic in socialist and (later) post-socialist Poland inspired me to write a series of short Warsaw poems (one rhyming couplet each) of which this one is the only survivor.

BIO:

Nick McRae's poems, reviews, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Passages North, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He has recently been a Fulbright fellow in the Slovak Republic and a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is now Poetry Review Editor for The Journal.