Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
From UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION
Once we had the world backwards and forwards . . .
Leaving the Movie Theater
Comic Love Poem
Black Song
From WHY WE LIVE
In Trite Rhymes
Circus Animals
From QUESTIONS YOU ASK YOURSELF
Questions You Ask Yourself
Lovers
Key
CALLING OUT TO YETI
Night
Hania
Nothing Twice
Flagrance
Buffo
Commemoration
Classifieds
Moment of Silence
Rehabilitation
To My Friends
Funeral (I)
I hear trumpets play the tune . . .
Brueghel's Two Monkeys
Still
Greeting the Supersonics
Still Life with a Balloon
Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition
An Effort
Four A.M.
Midsummer Night's Dream
Atlantis
I'm Working on the World
SALT
The Monkey
Lesson
Museum
A Moment in Troy
Shadow
The Rest
Clochard
Vocabulary
Travel Elegy
Without a Title
An Unexpected Meeting
Golden Anniversary
Starvation Camp Near Jaslo
Parable
Ballad
Over Wine
Rubens' Women
Coloratura
Bodybuilders' Contest
Poetry Reading
Epitaph
Prologue to a Comedy
Likeness
I am too close . . .
The Tower of Babel
Dream
Water
Synopsis
In Heraclitus's River
Poem in Honor
A Note
Conversation with a Stone
NO END OF FUN
The Joy of Writing
Memory Finally
Landscape
Family Album
Laughter
The Railroad Station
Alive
Born
Census
Soliloquy for Cassandra
A Byzantine Mosaic
Beheading
PietÃ
Innocence
Vietnam
Written in a Hotel
A Film from the Sixties
Report from the Hospital
Returning Birds
Thomas Mann
Tarsier
To My Heart, on Sunday
The Acrobat
A Paleolithic Fertility Fetish
Cave
Motion
No End of Fun
COULD HAVE
Could Have
Falling from the Sky
Wrong Number
Theater Impressions
Voices
The Letters of the Dead
Old Folks' Home
Advertisement
Lazarus Takes a Walk
Snapshot of a Crowd
Going Home
Discovery
Dinosaur Skeleton
Pursuit
A Speech at the Lost-and-Found
Astonishment
Birthday
Interview with a Child
Allegro ma Non Troppo
Autotomy
Frozen Motion
Certainty
The Classic
In Praise of Dreams
True Love
Nothingness unseamed itself for me too . . .
Under One Small Star
A LARGE NUMBER
A Large Number
Thank-You Note
Psalm
Lot's Wife
Seen from Above
The Old Turtle's Dream
Experiment
Smiles
Military Parade
The Terrorist, He's Watching
A Medieval Miniature
Aging Opera Singer
In Praise of My Sister
Hermitage
Portrait of a Woman
Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem
Warning
The Onion
The Suicide's Room
Apple Tree
In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself
Life While-You-Wait
On the Banks of the Styx
Utopia
Pi
THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE
Stage Fright
Surplus
Archeology
View with a Grain of Sand
Clothes
On Death, Without Exaggeration
The Great Man's House
In Broad Daylight
Our Ancestors' Short Lives
Hitler's First Photograph
The Century's Decline
Children of Our Age
Tortures
Plotting with the Dead
Writing a Résumé
Funeral (II)
An Opinion on the Question of Pornography
A Tale Begun
Into the Ark
Possibilities
Miracle Fair
The People on the Bridge
THE END AND THE BEGINNING
Sky
No Title Required
Some People Like Poetry
The End and the Beginning
Hatred
Reality Demands
The Real World
Elegiac Calculation
Cat in an Empty Apartment
Parting with a View
Séance
Love at First Sight
May 16, 1973
Maybe All This
Slapstick
Nothing's a Gift
One Version of Events
We're Extremely Fortunate
MOMENT
Moment
Among the Multitudes
Clouds
Negative
Receiver
The Three Oddest Words
The Silence of Plants
Plato, or Why
A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth
A Memory
Puddle
First Love
A Few Words on the Soul
Early Hour
In the Park
A Contribution to Statistics
Some People
Photograph from September 11
Return Baggage
The Ball
A Note
List
Everything
COLON
Absence
ABC
Highway Accident
The Day AfterâWithout Us
An Occurrence
Consolation
The Old Professor
Perspective
The Courtesy of the Blind
Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History
An Interview with Atropos
The Poet's Nightmare
Labyrinth
Distraction
Greek Statue
In Fact Every Poem
HERE
Here
Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets
An Idea
Teenager
Hard Life with Memory
Microcosmos
Foraminifera
Before a Journey
Divorce
Assassins
Example
Identification
Nonreading
Portrait from Memory
Dreams
In a Mail Coach
Ella in Heaven
Vermeer
Metaphysics
ENOUGH
Someone I've Been Watching for a While
Confessions of a Reading Machine
There Are Those Who
Chains
At the Airport
Compulsion
Everyone Sometime
Hand
Mirror
While Sleeping
Reciprocity
To My Own Poem
Map
Translator's Afterword
Translation Credits
Index of Titles and First Lines
Read More from WisÅawa Szymborska
About the Author
Footnotes
All works by WisÅawa Szymborska
copyright © The WisÅawa Szymborska Foundation
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www.szymborska.org.pl
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English translation © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
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All rights reserved
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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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www.hmhco.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN
978-0-544-12602-2
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e
ISBN
978-0-544-12777-7
v1.0415
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All translations in this edition were made by Clare Cavanagh or Clare Cavanagh and StanisÅaw BaraÅczak
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FROM
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UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION
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1944â1948
* * *
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Once we had the world backwards and forwards:
âit was so small it fit in two clasped hands,
so simple that a smile did to describe it,
so common, like old truths echoing in prayers.
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History didn't greet us with triumphal fanfares:
âit flung dirty sand into our eyes.
Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere,
poisoned wells and bitter bread.
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Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world,
âit is so large it fits in two clasped hands,
so hard that a smile does to describe it,
so strange, like old truths echoing in prayers.
Leaving the Movie Theater
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Dreams flickered on white canvas.
The moon's husk glimmered for two hours.
There was the melancholy song of love,
a happy journey's end and flowers.
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After the fairy tale, the world is hazy, blue.
The roles and faces here are unrehearsed.
The soldier sings the partisan's laments.
The young girl plays her songs of mourning too.
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I'm coming back to you, the real world,
crowded, dark, and full of fateâ
you, one-armed boy beneath the gate,
you, empty eyes of a young girl.
Comic Love Poem
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I wear beads around my neck.
Every day's a day of joy
sustained by the touch
of unforeseen events.
