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'The Witness of Poetry' by Czeslaw Milosz
nunia
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I highly recommend this little book to all wanna-be poets. "The Witness of Poetry' by Czeslaw Milosz, (first delivered as 'The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1981-82). Here are two poems i am most fond of.
AUTOTOMY
[ note by Milosz. Poland is a country of numerous women poets. In the sixties I noticed the poems of a very young poet, Halina Poswiatowska. They had a poignant tone, a despair at the mortality of the flesh, at being totally enclosed in that mortal flesh, and hence a particularly strong perception of love as constant menaced, on the border of nonbeing. In the seventies, when she died having barely reached thirty, a group of her friends tried to preserve her legend. At that time a well-known woman poet, Wislawa Szymborska, dedicated a poem to her memory. Its title, 'Autotomy', taken from zoology textbooks, means self-section. The creature that appears in it, the holothurian, also bears the name of sea cucumber.]
AUTOTOMY
In danger, the holothurian splits itself in two:
it offers one self to be devoured by the world
and, in its second self, escapes.
Violently it divides itself into a doom and a salvation,
into a penalty and a recompense, into what was and what will be.
In the middle of the holothurian's body a chasm opens
and its edges immediately become alien to each other.
On the one edge, death, on the other, life.
Here despair, there hope.
If there is a balance, the scales do not move.
If there is justice, here it is.
To die as much as necessary, without overstepping the bounds.
To grow again from a salvaged remnant.
We, too, know how to split ourselves
but only into the flesh and a broken whisper,
Into the flesh and poetry.
On one side the throat, on the other, laughter,
slight, quickly dying down.
Here a heavy heart, there non omnis moriar,
Three little words, like three little plumes of light.
We are not cut in two by a chasm.
A chasm surrounds us.
THE PEBBLE
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits.
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning.
with a secret which does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire.
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye.
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| [1/29/2006 11:44:09 PM] |
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