Czeslaw Milosz

1 Who will honor the city without a name If so many are dead and others pan gold Or sell arms in faraway countries? What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent— Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge? This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole, —In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains— I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees. The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts. A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar. In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac, Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile For despite Metternich all was not yet lost. And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée. 2 In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo, About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball In the city from which no voice could reach me. Minerals did not sound the last trumpet. There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava. In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed. Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood. From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom. In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky. The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true. In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem Of someone who had lived next door, entitled "An Hour of Thought." I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill. 3 With flutes, with torches And a drum, boom, boom, Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row. He walks arm in arm with his young lady, And over them swallows fly. They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes, As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street. And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud Over the Humanities Student Club, Division of Creative Writing. 4 Books, we have written a whole library of them. Lands, we have visited a great many of them. Battles, we have lost a number of them. Till we are no more, we and our Maryla. 5 Understanding and pity, We value them highly. What else? Beauty and kisses, Fame and its prizes, Who cares? Doctors and lawyers, Well-turned-out majors, Six feet of earth. Rings, furs, and lashes, Glances at Masses, Rest in peace. Sweet twin breasts, good night. Sleep through to the light, Without spiders. 6 The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge And kindles fire on landscapes "made from nature": The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana; The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village. The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly, While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves, I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me. 7 When I got rid of grieving And the glory I was seeking, Which I had no business doing, I was carried by dragons Over countries, bays, and mountains, By fate, or by what happens. Oh yes, I wanted to be me. I toasted mirrors weepily And learned my own stupidity. From nails, mucous membrane, Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen Whose house is made? Mine. So what else is new? I am not my own friend. Time cuts me in two. Monuments covered with snow, Accept my gift. I wandered; And where, I don't know. 8 Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp. Thus the feast of Insubstantiality. Under a gathering of clouds anywhere. In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo. No density. No harness of stone. Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke. And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets. 9 Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing. For I love the light too, perhaps the light only. Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me. So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen, Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes, And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church. 10 Unexpressed, untold. But how? The shortness of life, the years quicker and quicker, not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn. Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts, giggles above a railing, pigtails askew, sittings on chamberpots upstairs when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter. Female humanity, children's snots, legs spread apart, snarled hair, the milk boiling over, stench, shit frozen into clods. And those centuries, conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night instead of playing something like a game of chess or dancing an intellectual ballet. And palisades, and pregnant sheep, and   pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters, and cows cured by incantations. 11 Not the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river. Small whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts. So we trudged through the slush of melting snow To buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie. A fortune-teller hawking: "Your destiny, your planets." And a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine. Another, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking, By the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine. 12 Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert seven centuries ago. Where ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone it would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one. What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering? It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us. Perhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles inside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever lived. They trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets from Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray hair. Here there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the day are simultaneous. At dawn shit-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees at the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags. Rattling their wheels, "Courier" and "Speedy" move against the current to Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spread- eagled by his oars. At St. Peter and Paul's the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile over a nun who has indecent thoughts. Bearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the counter, instructing her twelve shopgirls. And all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric, preparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem. Black and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the cathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the half-charred oak logs in the hearth. Carrying her servant's-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in mourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the Romers' house in Bakszta Street. How it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not to be melted by the breath of these brief lives. And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open my eyes once more on a useless end of the world? I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door. But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away. The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atro- cious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire. And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights, there was not less bitterness but more. If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is transformed, at last, into harmony. Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun's secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names. The castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still a hardly audible—is it Mozart's Requiem?—music. In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not to find the desired word. Berkeley, 1968

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down. On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors' shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by the martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on. Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word. Warsaw, 1943

I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies. In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail. That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion, though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel. It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from, when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience? It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony. There was a time when only wise books were read, helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. People therefore preserve silent integrity, thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors. The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. Berkeley, 1968

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes. Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness, Like the flight of a moth which, had it known, Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame. Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety, The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored. I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride, The time when I was among their adherents Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting. But all of them would have one subject, desire, If only my own—but no, not at all; alas, I was driven because I wanted to be like others. I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me. The history of my stupidity will not be written. For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious. Berkeley, 1980.