Czesław Miłosz

Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?

I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot

Write anything; five hands

Seize my pen and order me to write

The story of their lives and deaths.

Was I born to become

a ritual mourner?

I want to sing of festivities,

The greenwood into which Shakespeare

Often took me. Leave

To poets a moment of happiness,

Otherwise your world will perish.

Love means to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills —

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,

what grain will be saved?My son, believe me, nothing remains,

Only adult toil,

the furrow of fate in the palm.

Only toil,

Nothing more.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.

I put this book here for you, who once lived

So that you should visit us no more.

Someone will read as moral

That the people of Rome or Warsaw

Haggle, laugh, make love

As they pass by martyrs' pyres.

Someone else will read

Of the passing of things human,

Of the oblivion

Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only

Of the loneliness of the dying,

Of how, when Giordano

Climbed to his burning

There were no words

In any human tongue

To be left for mankind,

Mankind who live on.