Hand

Twenty-seven bones,
thirty-five muscles,
around two thousand nerve cells
in every tip of all five fingers.
It's more than enough
to write Mein Kampf
or Pooh Corner.

by Wisława Szymborska
from Map: Collected and Last Poems
translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes ( Read more... )

Under One Small Star My apologies to chance for calling it necessity ( Read more... )

A Contribution to StatisticsOut of a hundred people ( Read more... )

I discovered earlier today, in a fit of poetry-related serendipity, that I share a birthday with Wislawa Szymborska. Also, she wrote a poem called Golden Anniversary. And furthermore, I turned 50, the golden anniversary of the day of my birth. So let's celebrate with that poem!

Golden AnniversaryThey must have been different once ( Read more... )

Lot's Wife They say I looked back out of curiosity ( Read more... )

Under One Small Star My apologies to chance for calling it necessity ( Read more... )

When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

A friend emailed me this morning and asked for recommendations for Holocaust poems. I only know a few Szymborska poems -- if you know of any, I'd love to hear them! Sorry so depressing. This one is just about torture in general, and I love it to death.

Tortures 
by Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and ( Read more... )

A friend emailed me this morning and asked for recommendations for Holocaust poems. I only know a few Szymborska poems -- if you know of any, I'd love to hear them! Sorry so depressing. This one is just about torture in general, and I love it to death.

Tortures 
by Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and ( Read more... )