Two Polish poems, and a sunflower

Focusing on my own work hasn’t been so easy lately, as I’m sure is the case for many of you. At such times I turn to certain things that help me: meditation, exercise, repetitive and absorbing activities like knitting, drawing, playing the piano, and reading — especially poetry. I want to try to share some peacefulness here in the days and weeks ahead, but not peacefulness devoid of meaning or significance for the moment in which we find ourselves.

Today I took down from my shelves a volume titled Postwar Polish Poetry, selected and edited by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1982. The work of 20th century Russian and, especially, Polish poets has always spoken to me. These are poets who have seen the worst; they write with irony and sometimes black humor, but they have not lost faith in humanity or its basic values, or in what is noble or beautiful in the world and in each life. Milosz explains his reasons for making the anthology:

The underlying motive, as I see it, was my distrust of a poetry which indulges in negation and in a sterile anger at the world. Man confronted with mechanisms beyond his control is a loser until he learns that what seemed to crush him was, in fact, a necessary trial to open a new dimension and to prepare his mind to cope with unheard-of circumstances. This, in my opinion, is what has happened in contemporary Polish poetry. A historical steam-roller has gone several times through a country whose geographical position, between Germany and Russia, is not particularly enviable. Yet the poet emerges perhaps more energetic, better prepared to assume tasks assigned to him by the human condition, than is his Western counterpart. (Milosz, 1982)

Here are two poems by Mieczyslaw Jastrun (1903-1983), whose work I did not know. I will read them aloud so you can hear his words as well as read them.

About Jastrun, Milosz has written: “He survived, in Warsaw, several years of the Nazi occupation, endangered every minute because of his Jewish origin. He was then publishing his poems in resistance periodicals; since then his poetry has reflected the despair of a man who has witnessed the crime of genocide. Delicate, frail, tenderhearted, Jastrun is torn between his deepest urges, which are basically metaphysical, and his will to moral or political commitments.”

Remembrance

When the crowd surrounded those dragged to death
You heard voices sneering at them,
You heard a cry, you looked at living eyes.
The sky was burning. The breeze was filled with smoke.

And you have come back to your native land
As one comes back to life. You look: a flower
Is being born of earth, fertile, much too fertile.
Like remorse, the distant trace of smoke turns blue,
The smell of burning is dispelled.
Shadows are pale.

The fragrance in the air is like a preparation
For new stems, for not-yet-spoken words.
The chestnuts are in bloom, and in the rusty wounds
Of earth, grass is at work, stitching up the web.
Buds are gluey, and in hazel thickets
The sound of water again.

For whom is delight? Revelation of strength?
For whom is the nightingale in the tangle of young trees?
Its song erupts, breaks off, as if fountains
Of light were gushing up against the sky —

And far more hostile, more indifferent
than all that common and inhuman grave
is the beauty of the earth. And he that lost himself
in the beauty of words as in some longed-for face —
his songs are pure, too pure. They will be overbalanced
by blood mixed with earth.

Beyond Time

I am not concerned at all with the golden age of those pines
Or the white time of a carnation
Or the time of the dust on the highway
Or the time of passing clouds.
Whether I lived an age or an instant loses its importance.
It is enough to glance into the eyes of a sunflower,
To grind up thyme in your hand,
Any scent in the infinitive suffices,
Any of the usually unnoticed things of the earth,
Suddenly perceived in such a way
That their shape with eyelids not quite closed
Denies transience (of water, of clouds, of man).