Wislawa Szymborska

First a quick post to honour this wonderful poet I just discovered.

You see, I was never into poetry; or literature for that matter. I used to read voraciously as a child, but had no one to guide me in new directions so it was all fairly usual and popular stuff. All the authors I read were ones I discovered myself or those that close friends were reading. In hindsight, I feel that I missed out on a great many. This is not to say that my teachers didn’t try. I remember getting books as prizes year after year. When I look back now at the books that I was gifted, I can see perhaps a conscious effort on the parts of my teachers to acknowledge my reading preferences, and introduce me to new books, usually classics. I still have copies of ‘Twenty thousand leagues under the Sea’, which I never took to, and ‘Silas Marner’, that I read and enjoyed and many such, which were prizes for various academic achievements.

I never took to the classics, somehow. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens bored me, mostly (blasphemy, yes!) though I did fall in love with ‘A tale of two cities’, which was such a welcome change from the morose ‘David Copperfield’ or ‘Oliver Twist’; as for Shakespeare, all I can say in my defense is that I find plays hard to read. There was also the fact that I never read the originals because the language was just so tedious and hard to understand, and I suppose one does lose something of their beauty in translations, especially in translations for children. I hope to go back to such classical authors someday, and discover them anew.

My reading habits grew worse as I grew older, and speed declined, and how! I nearly gave up reading because it took so long that it almost seemed like a chore. This was a long and sad phase that is not yet over, though I am trying to get back to reading.

Which is not to say that I don’t spend long hours in front of my computer screen, reading all kinds of stuff- newspaper articles and blog posts mostly, but still. It’s just that I don’t have the attention span for long pieces, which of course books are. Which is why it surprises me somewhat that I didn’t take to poetry earlier, which does come in lovely short capsules, mostly.

Of course, I still can’t claim to like too much of classical poetry. I admire it for its technique and mastery, no doubt. I just don’t take to stuff that is too lateral in meaning, or makes me reach for a dictionary (or rather, open dictionary.com.)

There are advantages of course, to not having known of countless authors and poets- and that is the joy of discovering them. There is a thrill that I get from reading a good book or story or poem that is indescribable. Sometimes it makes me shiver with excitement; sometimes it makes me sigh with wonder at the sheer beauty of the words, expressed with such simplicity. Sometimes there is an urge to share the words, and they end up as facebook status messages and mails to friends. The last such book that I read was Milan Kundera’s ‘Life is Elsewhere’. And this post is to share a couple of poems of Wislawa Szymborska, a name that I can barely pronounce and a woman that I didn’t know existed until she passed away recently, leading to her being quoted by several of my friends, as a tribute. One line caught my attention and I’m glad it did, for it belonged to a beautiful piece. And the search led to several other beautiful pieces, from which I reproduce two here:

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.

Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.

Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.

And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,

forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.

My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Truth, please don't pay me much attention.

Dignity, please be magnanimous.

Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.

Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.

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

My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.

I know I won't be justified as long as I live,

since I myself stand in my own way.

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

This one struck a chord! Yes, my apologies, many, many apologies, for all that I want to be, try to be, but fail more than I succeed;

apologies to all the people that I love, in the many ways that I love them, which sometimes goes unexpressed, or not expressed enough or is sometimes just not sufficient- for them or for me;

apologies to all the less fortunate, for it’s nothing but my good fortune that I have food to eat and a roof over my head, it could very easily have been otherwise; apologies for all the times that I have expensive dinners or wear expensive clothes, it’s not the divide I wish to highlight, sometimes I just indulge in my taste for good food and beauty;

apologies to all the persecuted, you don’t deserve it any more than I do; apologies for laughing and making merry while you have your house burned down, or run for life, or are tortured in prison, I do stand by you;

apologies to all of you fighting distant wars, or living in war like conditions, sometimes in not so distant places; apologies for the normalcy I enjoy- simple freedoms like travelling without having to carry identification papers and roaming the streets after dark.

And such apologies to many others that I may not yet remember, but who sometimes, just sometimes, introduce a tinge of guilt in my everyday living.

The other one is a wonderfully simple poem that ends with such hope and beauty, even as it drives home a feeling of injustice perhaps, but also inevitability. So much, in such few words!

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 in 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.