R.I.P.

[lapsedmodernist]

What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins
Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny
Day in spring?

What are you thinking here, where the wind
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the rubble?

You swore never to be
A ritual mourner.
You swore never to touch
The deep wounds of your nation
So you would not make them holy
With the accursed holiness that pursues
Descendants for many centuries.

But the lament of Antigone
Searching for her brother
Is indeed beyond the power
Of endurance. And the heart
Is a stone in which is enclosed,
Like an insect, the dark love
Of a most unhappy land.
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?

I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything; five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

It's madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

Warsaw, 1945

In a strange synchronicity I went to see this at The Point



R.I.P.Czeslaw Milosz 1911-2004

Comments

[fatangryroses.livejournal.com]

Oh Milosz! I did not even know he died. Was it on the 14th?? I will have to read a number of his poems outloud today to think of him. I loved him very much.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yes, it was on the 14th I think...I knew him more as an intellectual than a poet, "The Captive Mind" is one of the most incisive profound books I have ever read, and one I feel personally...but what little I have read in his poetry captured the same spirit, of him as a humanitarian, who ultimately believed in the human spriti.