I'm working on the world

I’m working on the world,

revised, improved edition,

featuring fun for fools,

blues for brooders,

combs for bald pates,

tricks for old dogs.

Here’s one chapter: The Speech

of Animals and Plants.

Each species comes, of course,

with its own dictionary.

Even a simple “Hi there,”

when traded with a fish,

make both the fish and you

feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings

of rustlings, chirps, and growls!

Soliloquies of forests!

The epic hoot of owls!

Those crafty hedgehogs drafting

aphorisms after dark,

while we blindly believe

they are sleeping in the park!

Time retains

its sacred right to meddle

in each earthly affair.

Still, time’s unbounded power

that makes a mountain crumble,

moves seas, rotates a star,

won’t be enough to tear

lovers apart: they are

too naked, too embraced,

too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,

the price that felons pay,

so don’t whine that it’s steep:

you’ll stay young if you’re good.

Suffering doesn’t insult the body.

Death? It comes in your sleep,

exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming

that you don’t need to breathe;

that breathless silence is

the music of the dark

and it’s part of the rhythm

to vanish like a spark.

Only a death like that. A rose

could prick you harder, I suppose;

you’d feel more terror at the sound

of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die

just that much. And to live just so.

And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played

for the time being

on a saw.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,

I make something no nonbeing can hold.

– Wislawa Szymborska Polish Poet (Born July 1923)/Nobel Literature Prize 1996

Excerpt from her Nobel Lecture

December 1996

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” …

The Poet and the World by Wislawa Szymborska

©THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 1996

with thanks to https://mybanyantree.wordpress.com/