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culturethatcounts · 9 years

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Identification

It’s good you came—she says. You heard a plane crashed on Thursday? Well so they came to see me about it. The story is he was on the passenger list. So what, he might have changed his mind. They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t fall apart. Then they showed me I don’t know who. All black, burned except one hand. A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring. I got furious, that can’t be him. He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that. The stores are bursting with those shirts. The watch is just a regular old watch. And our names on that ring, they’re only the most ordinary names. It’s good you came. Sit here beside me. He really was supposed to get back Thursday. But we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year. I’ll put the kettle on for tea. I’ll wash my hair, then what, try to wake up from all this. It’s good you came, since it was cold there, and him just in some rubber sleeping bag, him, I mean, you know, that unlucky man. I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea, since our names are completely ordinary—

[Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak]

#wizlawa szymborska #identification #poem #poetry #poem of the day

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omendreamer · 12 years

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My favorite poems of Wislawa Szymborska, my favorite modern poet who just died in the last few days are the following titles: “A Few Words On the Soul”, “On Death, Without Exaggeration”, “Cassandra”, “Under One Small Star”, “The End and the Beginning”, “Reality Demands”, “Turn of the Century”, “Lot’s Wife”, “Children of Our Age”, “Tortures”, “Hatred”, “Letters of the Dead”, and “Opinion on the Question of Pornography”. Here’s her most romantic poem (YMMV):

“True love. Is it normal, is it serious, is it practical? What does the world get from two people who exist in a world of their own? Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason, drawn randomly from millions, but convinced it had to happen this way—in reward for what? For nothing. The light descends from nowhere. Why on these two and not others? Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does. Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles, and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts. Look at the happy couple. Couldn’t they at least try to hide it, fake a little depression for their friends’ sake! Listen to them laughing—it’s an insult. The language they use—deceptively clear. And their little celebrations, rituals, the elaborate mutual routines— it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back! It’s hard even to guess how far things might go if people start to follow their example. What could religion and poetry count on? What would be remembered? What renounced? Who’d want to stay within bounds? True love. Is it really necessary? Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence, like a scandal in Life’s highest circles. Perfectly good children are born without its help. It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years, it comes along so rarely. Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.”

-Wislawa Szymborska “True Love”

Arrggh, okay ignore the 1st paragraph of HTML as I have tried a few times to ultimately get rid of it and can’t be arsed beyond that.

#Wislawa Szymborska #Wizlawa Szymborska #RIP #poetry

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