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Canada & the UN > Newton Bowles Reports
Preparation: A Poem And so, dear friends, once more I share with you a poem by the great Czeslaw Milosz, its music muted in translation from Polish to English, but its depth still there. Still one more year of preparation. Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book In which my century will appear as it really was. The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked. Springs and autumns will unerringly return, In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay And foxes will learn their foxy natures. And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire. No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years. I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy. I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly. With not-quite truth and not-quite art and not-quite law and not-quite science Under not-quite heaven on the not-quite earth the not-quite guiltless and the not-quite degraded |
