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Edited on Sat Jan-12-08 05:02 PM by BlueIris
"A Large Number"
Four billion people on this earth
but my imagination is still the same.
It's bad with large numbers.
It's still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.
But even a Dante couldn't get it right.
Let alone someone who isn't.
Even with all the muses behind me.
Non omnis moriar—a premature worry.
But am I entirely alive and is that enough.
It never was, and now, less than ever.
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
I whisper my reply to my stentorian calling.
I can’t tell you how much I pass over in silence.
A mouse at the foot of the maternal mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few signs scratched by a claw in the sand.
My dreams—even they're not as populous as they should be.
They hold more solitude than noisy crowds.
Sometimes a long-dead friend stops by awhile.
A single hand turns the knob.
An echo's annexes overgrow the empty house.
I run from the doorstep into a valley
that is quiet, as if no one owned it, already an anarchronism.
Why there's still all this space inside me
I don’t know.
—Wislawa Szymborska
(Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
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