Links
Archives
Monday, April 16, 2007
|
Czeslaw Milosz Six Lectures in Verse Lecture IV Reality, what can we do with it? Where is it in words? Just as it flickers, it vanishes. Innumerable lives Unremembered. Cities on maps only, Without that face in the window, on the first floor, by the market, Without those two in the bushes near the gas plant. Returning seasons, mountain snows, oceans, And the blue ball of the Earth rotates, But silent are they who ran through artillery fire, Who clung to a lump of clay for protection, And those deported from their homes at dawn And those who have crawled out from under a pile of bodies, While here, I, an instructor in forgetting, Teach that pain passes (for it's the pain of others), Still in my mind trying to save Miss Jadwiga, A little hunchback, librarian by profession, Who perished in the shelter of an apartment house That was considered safe but toppled down And no one was able to dig through the slabs of wall, Though knocking and voices were heard for many days. So a name is lost for ages, forever, No one will ever know about her last hours, Time carries her in layers of the Pliocene. The true enemy of man is generalization. The true enemy of man, so-called History, Attracts and terrifies with its plural number. Don't believe it. Cunning and treacherous, History is not, as Marx told us, anti-nature, And if a goddess, a goddess of blind fate. The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the spot Where her heart was pulsating. This only I set against necessity, law, theory. |