“Five Minutes After the air Raid”, is a poignant and nostalgic evocation of a woman who loses everything after her home and family are destroyed by a bomb.
The poem is written by Miroslav Holub, who skilfully balances the use of a factual journalistic tone with striking and at times shocking imagery, which combined evoke strong reactions in the reader. The encompassing sensation of horror and tragedy, are profoundly characteristic of Holub’s entire oeuvre. He was renowned for his humour in the face of tragedy, but there is a very pronounced lack of it in this instance.
Holub always maintained that his own personal objective was to speak out about widespread mortal suffering, and to steer clear of writing for the sake of making large rhetorical gestures. He said in one article:
“Only by capturing life around us we may be able to express its dynamics, the immense developments, rolling on around us and within us,”.
These objectives, required that Holub sacrificed the more structural techniques such as rhyming regular melodic poetry in favour of the irregular and free verse. His methods gave a new lease of life to old ideas, and encouraged a fresh style of imaginative freedom. Five minutes after the air raid, is a perfect example of this. It manages to convey its intellectual message clearly and concisely through very accessible colloquial language. Holub said after writing this work,
“I prefer to write for people untouched by poetry,”.
The enormity of his work is made all the more remarkable, when the perpetual struggles of his own life are taken into consideration. Holub was as renowned for the hardships of his personal life as well as his signature poetic technique. Born in Plzen Western Bohemia in 1923, Holub, a practising scientist in the field of immunology as well as a poet and a writer was unable to attend university until after the war had ended as the Nazis had closed down all Czech universities for the duration of the occupation. After completing his studies, Holub began to publish his poems, but found shortly afterwards that a ban had been imposed on his books, as a result of their strong political perspectives. Not wanting to restrict accessibility to his work, Holub offered a public self-criticism (thus ensuring the republication of his books and eventual translation of them), but also found a himself with a loss of respect from former colleagues and protégé’s.
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Holub is undoubtedly one of the most compelling voices of our time, and his great accomplishment is his ability to comment on a broad range of human experiences, and not just a single country’s specific history. This ability is clearly evident in “Five Minutes After The Air Raid”, where Holub uses the plight of an anonymous suffering citizen, to move rapidly between the actual and specific to the symbolic. For example, in the first lines of the poem, Holub establishes not just the location and setting of the poem, but gives us an actual address.
“In Pilsen twenty-six Station Road”
The lines which follow use effective imagery to bring the reader from certainty to uncertainty in a short space of time. One minute the woman appears to be on solid ground, making her every day ascent to her home, but from the poems title, we know that what follows will be a far cry from this woman’s regular routine. Upon opening the same door she has opened many times before she is met with a shockingly different world to the one familiar to her. The buildings physical ruin directly reflects the woman’s emotional state. The poem reads,
“this was the place the world had ended”
These lines demonstrate the fragility of human existence, and it is telling that they are singular and separate from the rest of the poem, creating a gap, between the first stanza of the poem, and the rest, its purpose is to demonstrate the divide between the woman’s old life, and that which follows the bomb. Holub is expressing that everything we know, everything we take for granted can be taken away in a single moment.
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Holub reveals, the woman’s disoriented mental state by having her perform an illogical action. She locks up the house. Why? There is nothing left to protect. Everything she had is gone, and Holub emphasises this, by suggesting she is protecting.
“Sirius or Aldebaran”
the two brightest and most precious stars in the sky. Perhaps she does this out of sheer habit, or to give herself a sense of closure. It is possible that Holub uses this act to symbolize the closing off of her heart to anything new, as in the lines which follow, we are told she goes back down the stairs, settles herself and waits. It is important to note that the poet does not say that she wishes, or hopes, she is waiting. She is expecting the impossible.
It is in these final lines, that the poem takes a shocking turn, as he uses horrific imagery to make the reader clearly comprehend the violence of the crime committed against this woman. Up to this point, there has been a feeling that this woman’s loss, extends far beyond that of material possessions, and these lines confirm that. She is waiting for
“the house to rise again and for her husband to rise from the ashes and for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back into place.”
The big question is what happens to the woman next. A different poet may have chosen to leave this question unanswered, but Holub uses his closing stanza to make plain to the reader this woman’s fate. The heartbreak has swallowed the woman whole. We are told,
“In the morning they found her still as stone, sparrows pecking at her hands”
Her body is still there, but her mind is gone. The fact that the people who find her are referred to as an anonymous “they”, is a further reminder that we know nothing about this woman, or her life, other then the tragic events of the previous day, which Holub has managed to convey with a detached objectiveness, while also allowing room for an underlying feeling of empathy.
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On a more personal note, for me the poems content seems plausible yet surreal, its considerable subject is emotive, but easily dismissible, like hearing a ghost story, it initially affects us profoundly. But for me its own extremity is ultimately its own downfall.
