no longer sure

 

 

 

 

It has come to this: I'm sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It's an insignificant event
and won't go down in history.
It's not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I'm sitting by this river, that's a fact.
And since I'm here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal's field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that's been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn't spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn't beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It's just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren't the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don't trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else's but its own.

When I see such things, I'm no longer sure
that what's important
is more important than what's not.

~  Wislawa Szymborska
S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh translation 

 

 

 

 

a few words on the soul

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have a soul at times.

No one's got it nonstop,

for keeps.

 

Day after day,

year after year

may pass without it.

 

Sometimes 

it will settle for a while

only in childhood's fears and raptures.

Sometimes only in astonishment

that we are old.

 

It rarely lends a hand

in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture,

or lifting luggage,

or going miles in shoes that pinch.

 

It usually steps out

 whenever meat needs chopping

or forms have to be filled.

 

For every thousand conversations

it participates in one,

if even that,

since it prefers silence. 

 

Just when our body goes from ache to pain

it slips off duty.

 

It's picky:

it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,

our hustling for a dubious advantage

and creaky machinations make it sick.

 

Joy and sorrow

aren't two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

 

We can count on it

when we're sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

 

Among the material objects

it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working

even when no one is looking.

 

It won't say where it comes from

or when it's taking off again,

though it's clearly expecting such questions.

 

We need it

but apparently 

it needs us

for some reason too.

 

 

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from Monologue of a Dog 

 

 

 

 

in abundance

 

 

 

 

 

I am who I am.

A coincidence as inscrutable

as any other.

 

Other ancestors

might have been mine, after all,

then from some other nest

I would have flown,

from some other stump

I would have crawled in my shell.

 

In nature's wardrobe

there are many costumes-

spider, seagull, field mouse.

Each fits like a glove from the get-go

and is loyally worn

until it wears out.

 

I, too, had no choice,

but I can't complain.

I could have been someone 

much less singular.

Someone from a school of fish,

from an anthill, from a buzzing swarm,

 a piece of landscape thrashed by the wind.

 

Someone much less lucky,

bred for fur

or for a holiday meal,

something swimming under a cover glass.

 

A tree stuck in the earth,

with a fire approaching.

 

A blade of grass trampled by a run 

of incomprehensible events.

 

One born under a dark cloud

whose lining gleams for others.

 

But what if I had awakened fear in people,

or merely revulsion,

or merely pity?

 

 If I hadn't been born 

into the right tribe and

paths closed before me?

 

Fate has proved

benevolent so far.

 

The memory of good moments

 might not have been granted me.

 

A penchant for comparisons

might have been withheld from me.

 

I might have been myself-though without the wonder,

but that would have meant

being someone else.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

 Nasa photo

 

 

water

 

 

 

 

 

A raindrop fell on my hand,

crafted from the Ganges and the Nile,

 

from the ascended frost of a seal's whiskers,

from water in broken pots in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

 

On my index finger

the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,

 

and the Pacific flows meekly into the Rudava,

the one that flew in a cloud over Paris

 

in seventeen sixty-four

on the seventh of May at three in the morning.

 

There are not enough lips to pronounce

your transient names, O water.

 

I would have to say them in every language

pronouncing all the vowels at once,

 

at the same time keeping silent-for the sake of a lake

that waited in vain for a name,

 

and is no longer on earth-as it is in the heavens,

whose stars are no longer reflected in it.

 

Someone was drowning; someone dying 

called out for you. That was long ago and yesterday.

 

You extinguished houses; you carried them off

like trees, forests like cities.

 

You were in baptismal fonts and in the bathtubs of courtesans,

in kisses, in shrouds.

 

Eating away at stones, fueling rainbows.

In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.

 

How light all this is in the raindrop.

How delicately the world touches me.

 

Whenever wherever whatever has happened

is written on the waters of Babel.

 

 

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

 

 

 

a speech at the lost and found

 

 

 

 

 

 

I lost a few goddesses on my way from south to north,

as well as many gods on my way from east to west,

Some stars went out on me for good: part for me, O sky. 

Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.

I'm not sure exactly where I left my claws,

who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell. 

My siblings died our when I crawled onto land

and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary. 

I leapt out of my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,

and left my senses many many times.

Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,

waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.

 

Scattered by the four winds to a place that time forgot,

how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,

 a singular being of human kind for now,

who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair 

 

 

 

the word

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

view with a grain of sand

We call it a grain of sand

but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.

It does just fine without a name,

whether general, particular,

permanent, passing,

incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.

It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.

And that it fell on the windowsill

is only our experience, not its.

For it it's no different than falling on anything else

with no assurance that it's finished falling

or that it's falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake

but the view doesn't view itself.

It exists in this world

colorless, shapeless,

soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly

and its shore exists shorelessly.

Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry

and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural,

They splash deaf to their own noise

on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless

in which the sun sets without setting at all

and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.

The wind ruffles it,  its only reason being

that it blows.

A second passes

A second second.

A third.

But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.

But that's just our simile.

The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,

his news inhuman.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Stanislaw Baraniczak and Clara Cavanagh

my apologies

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 

 My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. 

 Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. 

 May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. 

 My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. 

 My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. 

 Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. 

 Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 

 My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. 

 My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. 

 Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. 

 Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. 

 And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, 
staring, motionless, always at the same spot, 
 absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. 

 My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. 

 My apologies to large questions for small answers. 

 Truth, do not pay me too much attention. 

 Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. 

 Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. 

 Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. 

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. 

 My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. 

 I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. 

 Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

photo by agencja gazeta

on the value of not-knowing

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power
 by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, 
and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes,
 but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them
 once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else,
 since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge
 that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain
 the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases,
 cases well known from ancient and modern history, 
it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. 
It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include 
the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth 
hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” 
the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground 
like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up 
and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie
 never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up
 teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families,
 and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.
 But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, 
not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits
 are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness 
and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering,
 of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure
 that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses
 pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun
 to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know;
 whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got 
reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short,
 bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else
 we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, 
after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally 
acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. 
Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se 
and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, 
we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary
 course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
 nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
 Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, 
not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

 ~  Wisława Szymborska

 art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

 

so much of Everything

Reality demands

we also state the following:

life goes on.

At Cannae and Borodino.

at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica.

There is a gas station 

in a small plaza in Jericho,

and freshly painted

benches near Bila Hora.

Letters travel

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a furniture truck passes

before the eyes of the lion of Chaeronea,

and only an atmospheric front advances

toward the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything,

that Nothing is quite well concealed,

Music flows

from yachts at Actium

and on board couples dance in the sun.

So much keeps happening, 

that it must be happening everywhere.

Where not a stone is left standing,

there is an ice-cream truck

besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been,

Hiroshima is again

manufacturing products

for everyday use.

Not without its draws is this terrible world,

not without its draws

worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice

the grass is green

and on the grass is - you know how grass is -

transparent dew,

Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,

those still remembered,

and those long forgotten,

birch groves and cedar groves,

snows and sands, iridescent swamps,

and ravines of dark defeat

where today, in sudden need,

you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.

But what really flows is quickly drying blood,

and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes

the wind blows hats off heads

and we cannot help-

but laugh.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

 

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/

nothing's a gift

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.

I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.

I'll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

Here's how it's arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I'll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors.

some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we'll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless too.

I can't remember

where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it's the only item

not included on the list.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

among the multitudes

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.
I could have different
ancestors, after all.
I could have fluttered
from another nest
or crawled bescaled
from another tree.

Nature's wardrobe
holds a fair
supply of costumes:
Spider, seagull, fieldmouse.
each fits perfectly right off
and is dutifully worn
into shreds.

I didn't get a choice either,
but I can't complain.
I could have been someone
much less separate.
someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,
bred for my fur
or Christmas dinner,
something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground
as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede
of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness
dazzled some.
What if I'd prompted only fear,
Loathing,
or pity?

If I'd been born
in the wrong tribe
with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind
to me thus far.

I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments

My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is, someone completely different.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

 from Poems, New and Collected

 

possibilities

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.

I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

–Wislawa Szymborska

excerpt from Nothing Twice, 1997
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

 

 

 

clouds

I’d have to be really quick

to describe clouds -

a split second’s enough

for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:

they don’t repeat a single 

shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind, 

they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to? 

They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds, 

life rests on solid ground, 

practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds

even a stone seems like a brother, 

someone you can trust, 

while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,

and then die, one after another:

clouds simply don't care

what they're up to

down there.

And so their haughty fleet

cruises smoothly over your whole life

and mine, still incomplete.

They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.

They don't have to be seen while sailing on. 

–Wisława Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog

Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh translation

circus animals

Bears are stomping in perfect time.

A lion jumps through flaming hoops.

A whip cracks and the music grinds.

A monkey rides a bike in a yellow suit.

A whip cracks and the animals turn their glance.

Dogs dance in carefully measured movements.

An elephant walks with a pitcher in perfect balance.

Myself, I'm quite embarrassed, I, a human.

People didn't enjoy themselves that day.

You wouldn't know it from the clapping hands

though one hand elongated by a whip

cast a striking shadow on the sand.

~Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translation by Joanna Trzeciak

the end and the beginning

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired 

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs, 

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years,

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about 

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

 sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here 

must make way for 

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translation by Joanna Trzeciak

a note

Life is the only way 

to get covered in leaves,

catch your breath on the sand,

rise on wings;

to be a dog,

or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain

from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,

dawdle in views,

to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance

to remember for a moment

a conversation held

with the lamp switched off;

and if only once

to stumble on a stone,

end up drenched in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;

and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing

something important.

~Wislawa Szymborska

from Monologue of a Dog