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.
