Wislawa Szymborska (1923 – 2012)
Polish poet, essayist and translator.
Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy,
our peacocks have renounced their plumes.
The bats flew out of our hair long ago.
The going's rough, and so we need the laugh
of bright incisors, molars of goodwill.
Our times are still not safe and sane enough
for faces to show ordinary sorrow.
Show me your little poem
and I'll tell you why it wasn't written
any earlier or later than it was.
Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different.
Or a little bit different — which is to say, completely different.
Our stockpile of antiquity grows constantly,
it's overflowing,
reckless squatters jostle for a place in history,
hordes of sword fodder,
Hector's nameless extras, no less brave than he,
thousands upon thousands of singular faces,
each the first and last for all time,
in each a pair of inimitable eyes.
How easy it was to live not knowing this,
so sentimental, so spacious.
Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.
Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me
how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily
declined in human form, just now making such a fuss
about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus.
And how can we talk of order overall
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Here we are, naked lovers,
beautiful to each other—and that's enough.
The leaves of our eyelids our only covers,
we're lying amidst deep night.
He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time.
All that was to pass passed in this house.
Not in housing projects,
not in furnished but empty quarters,
among unknown neighbors
on fifteenth floors
that student field trips rarely reach.
This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.
So he's got to have happiness,
he's got to have truth, too,
he's got to have eternity —
did you ever!
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
And only we few who remain unstripped of fur,
untorn from bone, unplucked of soaring feathers,
esteemed in all our quills, scales, tusks, and horns,
and in whatever else that ingenious protein
has seen fit to clothe us with,
we, my lord, are your dream,
which finds you innocent for now.
Secret codes resound.
Doubts and intentions come to light.
They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on.
I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son,
the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,
a tiny creature, made up of two pupils
and whatever simply could not be left out...
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Millennia have passed
since you first called me archaeology.
I no longer require
your stone gods, your ruins with legible inscriptions.
Show me your whatever
and I'll tell you who you were.