WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA ~

 

R E A D     M E

New Directions

2021

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA ~

To My Own Poem




Best case scenario —

you'll be, my poem, read attentively,

discussed, remembered.



Worst comes to worst,

only read.



A third option —

actually written,

but tossed into the trash a moment later.



The fourth and final possibility —

you slip away unwritten,

happily humming something to yourself.


_________________________


Wislawa Szymborska
M A P
Collected and Last Poems
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak
Houghton Mifflin 2015

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA ~

In Praise of My Sister



My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely that she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
   Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.



_________________

Wislawa Szymborska
M A P
Collected and Last Poems
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak
Houghton Mifflin 2015

EARTH ~

Wislawa Szymborska


Born 87 years ago (July 2, 1923) in Poland

and publishing, with care, about 250 poems

so far

everyone knows poet, essayist, translator

Wislawa Szymborska

Nobel Prize for Literature, 1996.

MICROCOSMOS


When they first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it is still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.


But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.


The glass doesn't even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.


To say they're many isn't saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they're multiplied.


They don't even have decent innards.
They don't know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are — or aren't.
Still they decide our life and death.


Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don't know what their moment is.
Since they're so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be pulverized accordingly.


A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a far-flung labyrinth,
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.


I've wanted to write about them for a long-while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.


ASSASSINS

They think for days on end,

how to kill so as to kill,

and how many killed will be many.

Apart from this they eat their meals with gusto,

pray, wash their feet, feed the birds,

make phone calls while scratching their armpits,

stanch blood when they cut a finger,

if they're women they buy sanitary napkins,

eye-shadow, flowers for vases,

they make jokes on their good days,

drink citrus juice from the fridge,

watch the moon and stars at night,

place headphones with soft music on their ears

and sleep sweetly till the crack of dawn

— unless what they're thinking needs doing at night.

VERMEER


So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn't earned
the world's end.





translated from the Polish by
Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak
Here (Houghton Mifflin)