Poem of the Week

• Editor’s note: In recognition of National Poetry Month each week in April a poem will be published in Lifestyle. This week meet Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. Since 1931 she has been living in Krakow, where during 1945-1948 she studied Polish literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian University. Her poems have been translated (and published in book form) into English, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian and other languages. Szymborska is the Goethe Prize winner (1991) and Herder Prize winner (1995). She has an honorary doctorate of letters from Poznan University (1995). In 1996 she received the Polish PEN Club prize.

By Wislawa Szymborska

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink

on ordinary paper: they were given no food,

they all died of hunger. “All. How many?

It’s a big meadow. How much grass

for each one?” Write: I don’t know.

History counts its skeletons in round numbers.

A thousand and one remains a thousand,

as though the one had never existed:

an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,

an ABC never read,

air that laughs, cries, grows,

emptiness running down steps toward the garden,

nobody’s place in the line.

We stand in the meadow where it became flesh,

and the meadow is silent as a false witness.

Sunny. Green. Nearby, a forest

with wood for chewing and water under the bark-

every day a full ration of the view

until you go blind. Overhead, a bird-

the shadow of its life-giving wings

brushed their lips. Their jaws opened.

Teeth clacked against teeth.

At night, the sickle moon shone in the sky

and reaped wheat for their bread.

Hands came floating from blackened icons,

empty cups in their fingers.

On a spit of barbed wire,

a man was turning.

They sang with their mouths full of earth.

“A lovely song of how war strikes straight

at the heart.” Write: how silent.

“Yes.”