[“But poets are
the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table
or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a
while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen
minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of
thing?” ~ Wislawa Szymborska]
Excerpt:
And the rose only, a sexual symbol,
Symbol of love and superterrestrial beauty,
Will open a chasm deeper than your knowledge.
About it we find a song in a dream:
Inside the rose
Are houses of gold,
black isobars, streams of cold.
Dawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps
And evening streams down to the bays of the sea.
If anyone dies inside the rose,
They carry him down the purple-red road
In a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds.
They light up the petals of grottoes with torches.
They bury him there where color begins,
At the source of the sighing,
Inside the rose.
Let names of months mean only what they mean.
Let the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none
Of them, or the tread of young rebels marching.
We might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir,
Preserved like a fan in a garret. Why not
Sit down at a rough country table and compose
An ode in the old manner, as in the old times
Chasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?
“Natura: Section IV" from “A Treatise on Poetry” by Czeslaw Milosz; from New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001. Copyright © 2001 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)
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