Marks in the Margin: Any Case

Marks in the Margin: Any Case
Excerpt:
October is National Poetry Month (in England--Patrick Kurp calls it the true Poetry Month) and as it draws to a close, I will post my annual poem by the Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska called Any Case, also sometimes titled Could Have.

I discovered the poem at the end of Julie Orringer’s remarkable novel The Invisible Bridge, an epic tale of three brothers trying to survive during the Holocaust in Hungary. It is a long novel that drew me in from the first sentence and would not let me out for a full 600 pages. The following passage occurs in the novel:

…the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life is balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket.

Any Case
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer. Farther away.
It happened, but not to you...