SELECTED POLISH POEMS

ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO – Poetry by Wislawa Szymborska

Life, you’re beautiful (I say), you just couldn’t get more fecund, more befrogged or nightingaily, more anthillful or sproutspouting. I’m trying to court life’s favor, to get into its good graces, to anticipate its whims. I’m always the first to bow, always there where it can see me, with my humble, reverent face, soaring on the wings of rapture, falling under waves of wonder. Oh how grassy is this hopper, how this berry ripely rasps. I would never have conceived it, if I weren’t conceived myself! Life (I say) I’ve no idea what I could compare you to. No one else can make a pine cone, and then make the pine cone’s clone. I praise your inventiveness, bounty, sweep, exactitude, sense of order gifts that border, on witchcraft and wizardry. I just don’t want to upset you, tease or anger, vex or rile. For millennia, I’ve been trying, to appease you with my smile. I tug at life by its leaf hem: will it stop for me, just once, momentarily forgetting to what end it runs and runs?

THE STONES – Poetry by Grażyna Chrostowska

I used to like watching stones, they are naked, simple like a truth. Silent rough beings. Without tears and love, without complaint. Thrown on huge, wide earth. Stripped yearnings, free from hope. Stand, belonging to nobody, yet with grief. Of their hard eternity. Free from illusion, alone in nothingness. And I sorrowed unwisely over something, that I might cry among those mute rocks, that winds chop them up, storms are passing by, but they last, and nobody rules over them, because they had lived, and became human hearts.

CHINESE POEM – Poetry by Adam Zagajewski

I read a Chinese poem, written a thousand years ago. The author talks about the rain, that fell all night on the bamboo roof of his boat, and the peace that finally settled in his heart. Is it just coincidence that it’s November again, with fog, and a leaden twilight? Is it just chance that someone else is living? Poets attach great importance to prizes and success, but autumn after autumn tears leaves from the proud trees, and if anything remains it’s only the soft murmur of the rain, in poems neither happy nor sad. Only purity can’t be seen, and evening, when both light and shadow, forget us for a moment, busily shuffling mysteries.