The Storm.

The heavens sense our burden: the threat of future downpours I carry on my back. We are drunk on wine vinegar.
The nearing storm rouses me, it makes me want to shake the world. We are an assembly of misery. If our hands are bloody, it is from the blood of our own wounds. The grotesque scars we bear on our bodies testify to battles fought that went unrecognized. But the next storm will unfurl our flag and uproot the rotted trees! Then we, together with the gusting wind, will scale Spilberk's heights, and stand in victory on the peaks of cliffs, our hair blowing freely in the wind.
The Storm by Jirka Polak is a gloomy outlook on life under the status of a prisoner. The weight of the entire world bears down upon him, the predestined future of not only himself but the entire Jewish people as a collective entity staring him directly in the eyes. He progresses through the conditions of war, epitomising it with the behaviour of a storm. At the beginning, he tells us that we (referring to his generation as a collective unit) are drunk on wine vinegar. Here, it is possible he is making biblical references to the fact that stale wine, or vinegar, was traditionally used to corrupt a source of drink so that it is used as a punishment. The fruit of the vine goes through three phases from its path as a food for drink to a liquid that is undesirable, and thus, he confesses the sins of his generation. However, the rising storm of war shook his foundations, and he found himself wanting to change the world by shaking it. In the next stanza, the narrator sinks into the throes of self-pity, going on to lament the tragedies of his race, telling us that the figurative blood that stains his hands is his own only. He alludes to the constantly-tormented history of the Jewish people by speaking of the scars the race bears, and how these scars testify to battles fought that went unrecognised. This could be a reference to the omnipresence of anti-Semitism throughout history: persecution by the Romans, massacres at the hands of the Cossacks, exile from Prussia, condemnation by the Bible. But most significant perhaps was the Crusades, one of the greatest acts of human atrocity ever committed, yet barely recognised as substantial. In a final act of desperate resistance against his stultifying confinement the narrator strains towards optimism, telling us that the storm will one day liberate his race and redefine their statuses as a race. He explains that the tides of war will carry them to greater heights, will aid them in overcoming their obstructions. He speaks of climbing the proverbial cliffs of achievement, and ultimately being able to stand up as free as hair blowing in the wind. In the end though, he realises that these dreams, like most others, will go unfounded, unrealised, and quite probably be rejected, and thus we realise that his dream is purely one of fantasy, an attempt to escape his reality. The narrators nihilsitic riffs reflect the idea of a retrospective on life, memory in the shadow of inevitable death; a symbol of his acceptance of his predicament, and foreboding for the inevitable. By drenching the poem in layers
of figurative rain, Polak establishes the periodic destruction wrought by his metaphorical storm as an agent of divine retribution and disaster, the threat of annihilation. However, it also symbolises the exaltation of rain as an ultimate salvitic force and intermediary between hell and freedom. Constantly strained under the burden of an ever-present despondency though, the narrator still manages to come through his gloom and establish a light at the end of his darkness. He reaches out in feeble attempts to face his fears, yet he is always beaten down. Ultimately though, The Storm is not just the story of a single man, but the story of a races vain hope of salvation in the midst of its apocalypse. The part that makes it so tragic is, though, that there lies no salvation in their futures. Very few, if any, will make it out alive. There is no exit. -Spencer Yan

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The heavens sense our burden: the threat of future downpours I carry on my back. We are drunk on wine vinegar.

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