Wednesday, February 1, 2012

3 random poems by czeslaw milosz




And Yet the Books




And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters.  So much more durable 
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.


                                               
                                                                        Berkley, 1986
                                                                         (trans. by the author and Robert Hass)


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A Poetic State




As if I were given a reversed telescope instead of eyes, the world moves away and everything grows smaller, people, streets, trees, but they do not lose their distinctness, are condensed.


In the past I had such moments writing poems, so I know distance, disinterested contemplation, putting on an "I" which is not "I," but now it is like that constantly and I ask myself what it means, whether I have entered a permanent poetic state.


Things once difficult are easy, but I feel no strong need to communicate them in writing.


Now I am in good health, where before I was sick because time galloped and I was tortured by fear of what would happen next.


Every minute the spectacle of the world astonishes me; it is so comic that I cannot understand how literature could expect to cope with it.


Sensing every minute, in my flesh, by my touch, I tame misfortune and do not ask God to avert it, for why should He avert it from me if He does not avert it from others?


I dreamt that I found myself on a narrow ledge over the water where large sea fish were moving.  I was afraid I would fall if I looked down, so I turned, gripped with my fingers at the roughness of the stone wall, and moving slowly, with my back to the sea, I reached a safe place.


I was impatient and easily irritated by time lost on trifles among which I ranked cleaning and cooking.  Now, attentively, I cut onions, squeeze lemons, and prepare various kinds of sauces.


                                              
                                                                       Berkley, 1977
                                                                        (trans. by the author and Robert Hass)


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Study of Loneliness




A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?
The one-man crew of a fortress in the sand?
Whoever he was.  At dawn he saw furrowed mountains
The color of ashes, above the melting darkness,
Saturated with violet, breaking into fluid rouge,
Till they stood, immense, in the orange light.
Day after day.  And, before he noticed, year after year.
For whom, he thought, that splendor?  For me alone?
Yet it will be here long after I perish.
What is it in the eye of a lizard?
Or when seen by a migrant bird?
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
And he knew there was no use crying out,
for none of them would save him.


                                               
                                                                       Berkley, 1975
                                                                        (trans. by the author and Lillian Vallee)


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