poetry reading

.

I'm curled into a ball

like a dog

that is cold.

Who will tell me 

why I was born,

why this monstrosity

called life.

The telephone rings.  I have to give

a poetry reading.

I enter.

A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes.

They look, they wait.

I am supposed to tell them

why they were born,

why there is 

this monstrosity called life.

~  Anna Swirszczynska
translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan