S is for Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska is a Polish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, one of only twelve women to receive it. I first discovered her in 'Staying Alive' and went on to buy her first collection translated into english, 'View with a Grain of Sand'. 

The End and The Beginning

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides 
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by,

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves wil be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listening, nodding
his unsheltered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.


And then Brainpickings presented me with this lovely reading just recently and so I thought I would give you a multi-sensory post today.



(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)