Wislawa Szymborska

[Stormy]

The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.


Drinking Wine
He looked at me, bestowing beauty,
and I took it for my own.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I let him invent me
in the image of the reflection
in his eyes. I dance, I dance
in an abundance of sudden wings.

A table is a table, wine is wine
in a wineglass, which is a wineglass
and it stands standing on a table
but I am a phantasm,
a phantasm beyond belief,
a phantasm to the core.

I tell him what he wants to hear

[Optimus Funk]

Stormy I shall read all this and post about it before anyone else, I am drunk and please ingore me, but then quote me!

[Optimus Funk]

Ok first, about "The End and the Beginning", sad and very true, but I am lost in the fact that it tells what we feel, I mean It tells the facts very well, we hate war, we know why we hate war, it points it out so well, but I hate to bang a gong we are over that!, War Kills, War is Evil!, We need solutions not reflections! Harsh maybe, the truth yes. I agree with you all my heart understand that, but I just want us to stop, In conclusion I can only say this as my poem.....


"The War"

STOP!

by Brian Hohman.....

[Stormy]

Originally Posted by Optimus Funk

Ok first, about "The End and the Beginning", sad and very true, but I am lost in the fact that it tells what we feel, I mean It tells the facts very well, we hate war, we know why we hate war, it points it out so well, but I hate to bang a gong we are over that!, War Kills, War is Evil!, We need solutions not reflections! Harsh maybe, the truth yes. I agree with you all my heart understand that, but I just want us to stop, In conclusion I can only say this as my poem.....


"The War"

STOP!

by Brian Hohman.....

I think the central theme of the poem is more than anti-war. It hopes to extrapolate the degeneration of the horrors of war during the post-war period, in which the dead ARE left "In the grass which has overgrown / reasons and causes," and what is forgotten behind the bushes and what is forgetting things behind the bushes understands "...less than little. And finally as little as nothing. " I appreciate the closing image of the poem the most, with the glazed eyes staring at the sky. I think it's an appropriate representation of what war becomes when it has passed; something grotesquely idyllic.

A pair of poems I read while drunk last night and which encouraged me to return to more poetry:

A Speech at the Lost and Found
I lost a few goddesses on my way from south to north,
as well as many gods on my way from east to west.
Some stars went out on me for good: part of me, O sky.
Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.
I'm not sure exactly where I left my claws,
who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell.
My siblings died out when I crawled onto land
and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary.
I leapt out of my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,
and left my senses many many times.
Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,
waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.

Scattered by the four winds to a place that time forgot,
how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,
a singular being of human kind for now,
who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.


A Large Number
Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is the way it's always been:
bad with large numbers.
It is still moved by particularity.
It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,
disclosing only random faces,
while the rest go blindly by,
unthought of, unpitied.
Not even a Dante could have stopped that.
So what do you do when you're not,
even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar---a premature worry.
Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?
It never has been, and even less so now.
I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,
but what I reject, is more numerous,
more dense, more intrusive than ever.
At the cost of untold losses--a poem, a sigh.
I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.
How much I am silent about I can't say.
A mouse at the foot of mouther mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.
[--page break-- (not part of poem)]
My dreams--even they are not as populous as they should be.
There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.
Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.
A single hand turns a knob.
Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.
I run from the threshold down into the quiet
valley, seemingly no one's--an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from--
that I don't know.

[Optimus Funk]

"Drinking Wine" I loved it, the feeling the passion the fact that a man can relate just as much as any woman I think, it is very true. I mean replace the hes and shes and I love it, I mean anyone could relate to that. Though I hesitate in the fact that I can never understand your point of view as a male, but as much as I can as a guy I think it is a great poem!

[Optimus Funk]

although she once remarked in a poem entitled "Some like poetry" that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art. She knew that those that do care will not not necessarily care for her art/ I love peatry and I love some of hers but I dont love it all w/ or without booze

[Optimus Funk]

I can't post about too close for him cause it touches me far to personally, and artist shoud be like Wilsawa, not caring in of other but herselft cayse in the end, only you determine your future, I think, peace eat well, and I cant wait for some 2 dollar sloppy joes at O'hallerons!

[Stormy]

Finals drive me back to the arts, because they are an indulgence which is more productive than... other things. I don't have many books of poetry in my room currently, and so I resort to rereading The Miracle Fair, and finding more to appreciate in Szymborska's poetry. I don't mean to treat this forum as some suburban teen's livejournal, though I don't necessarily intend to spark great literary discussions, either. I'm only hoping that someone else might appreciate a line, or a stanza, or a poem, and that they might have something we also may appreciate.

Drinking Wine
He looked at me, bestowing beauty,
and I took it for my own.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I let him invent me
in the image of the reflection
in his eyes. I dance, I dance
in an abundance of sudden wings.

A table is a table, wine is wine
in a wineglass, which is a wineglass
and it stands standing on a table
but I am a phantasm,
a phantasm beyond belief,
a phantasm to the core.

I tell him what he wants to hear -- about ants
dying of love
under a dandelion's constellation.
I swear that sprinkled with wine
a white rose will sing.

I laugh, and tilt my head
carefully, as if I were testing
an invention. I dance, I dance
in astounded skin, in the embrace
that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea foam,
Minerva from the head of Jove
were much more real.

When he's not looking at me,
I search for my reflection
on the wall. All i see
is a nail on which a painting hung.