Wislawa Szymborska Nothing Twice Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you're the planet's biggest dunce, you can't repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with exactly the same kisses. One day, perhaps, some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent. The next day, though you're here with me, I can't help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is it a flower or a rock? Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to say: Today is always gone tomorrow. With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we're different (we concur) just as two drops of water are. ------------------------------------ Life while-you-wait Life While-You-Wait Performance without rehearsal. Body without alterations. Head without premeditation. I know nothing of the role I play. I only know it's mine, I can't exchange it. I have to guess on the spot just what this play's all about. Ill-prepared for the privilege of living, I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands, I improvise, although I loathe improvisation. I trip at every step over my own ignorance. I can't conceal my hayseed manners. My instincs are for hammy histrionics. Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more. Extenuating cricumstances strike me as cruel. Words and impulses you can't take back, stars you'll never get counted, your character like a raincoat you button on the run - the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness. If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, or repeat a single Thursday that has passed! But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen. Is it fair, I ask (my voice a little hoarse, since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage). You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no. I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is. The props are surprisingly precise. The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer. The farthest galaxies have been turned on. Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere. And whatever I do will become forever what I've done. ------------------------------------ For the first time Are those your eyes, is that your smile I've been lookin at your forever But I never saw you before Are these your hands holdin'' mine Now I wonder how I could of been so blind For the first time I am looking in your eyes For the first time I'm seein' who you are I can't believe how much I see When you're lookin back at me Now I understand why love is ...... Love is .....for the first time.... Can this be real, can this be true Am I the person I was this morning And are you the same you It's all so strange how can it be All along this love was right in front of me For the first time I am looking in your eyes For the first time I'm seeing who you are I can't believe how much I see When you're lookin back at me Now I understand why love is ... Love is .....for the first time.... Such a long time ago I had given up on findin' this emotion..ever again But you live with me now Yes I've found you some how And I've never been so sure And for the first time I am looking in your eyes For the first time I'm seein' who you are Can't believe how much I see When you're lookin back at me Now I understand why love is ...... Love is ...... for the first time..... ------------------------------------ Thank-you note I owe so much to those I don't love. That relief as I agree that someone else needs them more. The happiness that I'm not the wolf to their sheep. The peace I feel with them, the freedom- love can neither give nor take that. I don't wait for them, as in window-to-door-and-back. Almost as patient as a sundial, I understand what love can't, and forgive as love never would. From a rendezvous to a letter is just a few days or weeks, not an eternity. Trips with them always go smoothly, concerts are heard, cathedrals visited, scenery is seen. And when seven hills and rivers come between us, the hills and rivers can be found on any map. They deserve the credit if I live in three dimensions, in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space with a genuine, shifting horizon. They themselves don't realize how much they hold in thier empty hands. "I don't owe them a thing," would be love's answer to this open question. ------------------------------------ Family Album No one in this family has ever died of love. No food for myth and nothing magisterial. Consumptive Romeos? Juliets diphtherial? A doddering second childhood was enough. No death-defying vigils, love-struck poses over unrequited letters strewn with tears! Here, in conclusion, as scheduled, sppears a portly, pince-nez'd neighbor bearing roses. No suffocation-in-the-closet gaffes because the cuckold returned home too early! Those frills or furbelows, however founced and whirly, barred no one from the family photographs. No Bosch-like hell within their souls, no wretches found bleeding in the garden, shirts in stains! (True, some didi die with bullets in their brains, for othe reasons, though,and on field stretchers.) Even thisbelle with rapturous coiffure who may have dnaced till dawn-but nothing smarter- hemorrhaged to a better world, bien sur, but not to taunt or hurt you, slick-haired partner. For others, Death was mad and monumental- not for these citizens of a sepia past. Their griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast, their vanishing was due to influenza. ------------------------------------ Could Have It could have happened. It had to happen. It happened earlier. Later. Nearer. Farther off. It happened, but not to youl. You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. Alone. With others. On the right. The left. Because it was raining. Because of the shade. Because the day was sunny. You were in luck-there was a forest. You were in luck-there were not trees. You were in luck-a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, a jamb, a turn, a quarter inch, an instant. You were in luck-just then a straw went floating by. As a result, because, although, despite. What would have happened if a hand, a foot, within an inch, a hairsbreadth from an unfortunae coincidence. So you're here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve? One hole in the net and you slipped through? I couldn't be more shocked or speechless. Listen, how your heart pounds inside me. ------------------------------------ Wrong Number At midnight, in an empty, hushed art gallery a tactless telephone spews fortha a stream of rings; a human sleeping now would jump up instantly, but only sleepless prophets and untiring kings reside here, where the moonlight makes them pale; they hold their breath, their eyes fixed on some nail or crack; only the young pawnbroker'sbride seems taken bythat oldd, ringing contraption, but even she won't lay her fan aside, she too just hangs there, caught in mid-nonaction. Above it all, in scarlet robes or nude, they view nocturnal fuss as simply rude. Here's more black humor worthy of the name than if some grand duke leaned out from his frame and vented his frustration with a vulgar curse. And if some silly man calling from town refuses to give up, put the receiver down, though he's got the wrong number? he lives, so he errs. ------------------------------------ Astonishment Why after all this one and not the rest? why this specific elf, not in a nest, but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin? Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face? Why on earth now, on Tuesday of all days, and why on earth, pinned down by this star's pin? In spite of years of my not being here? In spite of seas of all these dates and fates, these cells, celestials, and coelenterates? What is it really that made me appear neither a minute nor aeons too early? What am I staring now into the dark and muttering this unending monologue just like the growling thing we call a dog? ------------------------------------ Memory Finally Memory's finally found what it was after. My mother has turned up, my father has been spotted. I dreamed up a table and two chairs. They sat. They were mine again, alive again for me. The two lamps of their faces gleamed at dusk as if for Rembrandt. Only now can I begin to tell in how many dreams they've wandered, in how many crowds I dragged them out from underneath the wheels, in how many deathbeds they moaned with me at their side. Cut off, they grew back, but never straight. The absurdity drove them to disguises. So what if they felt no pain outside me, they still ached within me. In my dreams, gawking crowds heard me call out Mom to a bouncing, chirping thing up on a branch. They made fun of my father's hair in pigtails. I woke up ashamed. So, finally. One ordinary Friday night they suddenly came back exactly as I wanted. In a dream, but somehow freed from dreams, obeying just themselves and nothing else. In the picture's background possibilities grew dim, accidents lacked the necessary shape. Only they shone, beautiful because just like themselves. They appeared to me for a long, long, happy time. I woke up, I opened my eyes. I touched the world, a chieseld picture-frams. ------------------------------------ Alive These days we just hold him. Hold him living. Only the heart still pounces on him. To the dismay of our distaff cousin, the spider, he will not be devoured. We permit his head, pardoned centuries ago, to rest upon our shoulder. For a thousand tangled reasons it's become our practice to listen to him breathe. Hissed fromour mysteries. Broken of our bloody ways. Stripped of female menace. Only the fingernails still glitter, scratch, and retract. Do they know, can they guess tht they're the last set of silverware from the family fortune? He's already forgotten he should flee us. He doesn't know the wide-eyed fear that grabs you by the shrot hairs. He looks as if he'd just been born. All out of us. All ours. On his cheek, an eyelash's imploring shadow. Between his shoulderblades, a touching trickle of sweat. That's what he is now, and that's how he'll nod off. Truthful. Hugged by a death whose permit has elapsed. ------------------------------------ True Love True love. Is it normal, is it serious, is it practical? What does the world get from two people who exist in a world of their own? Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason, drawn rnadomly from millions, but convinced it had to happen this way-in reward for what? For nothing. The light descends from nowhere. Why on these two and not on others? Doesn't thisoutrage justtice? Yes it does. Doesn't it disrupt our painstakinglhy erected principles, and the cast the morla from the peak? Yes on both accounts. Look at the happy couple. Couldn't they at elast try to hide it, fake a little despression for their friends' sake! Listen to them laughing-it's an insult. The language they use-deceptively clear. And their little celebrations,ritualss, the elaborate mutual routines- it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back! It's hard even to guess how far things might go if people start to follow thier example. Wht could religion and poetry count on? What would be remembered? what renounced? Who'd want to stay within bounds? True love. Is it really necessary? Tact and commonsense tell us to pass over it in silence, like a scandal in Life's highest circles. Perfectly good children are born without its help. It couldn't populate the planet in a million years, it comes along so rarely. Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there' sno such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die. ------------------------------------ Allegro Ma Non Troppo Life, you're beautiful (I say) you just couldn't get mor fecund, more befrogged or nightinggaley, more anthillful or sprouotspouting. I'm trying to court life's favor, to get into its good graces, to anticipate its whims. I'm always the first to bow, always there where it can see me with my humble, reverent face, soaring on the wings of rapture, falling under waves of wonder. Oh how grassy is this hopper, how this berry ripely rasps. I would never have conceived it if I weren't conceived myself! Life (I say) I've no idea what I could compare you to. No one else can make a pine cone and then make the pine cone's clone. I praise your inventtiveness, bounty, sweep, exactitude, sense of order-gifts that border on witchcraft and wizardry. I just don't want to upset you, tease or anger, vex or rile. For millennia, I've been trying to appease you with my smile. I tug at life by its leaf hem: will it stop for me, just once, momentarily forgetting to what end it runs and runs? ------------------------------------ Snapshot of a crowd In the snapshot of a crowd, my head's seventh from the edge, or maybe fourth from the left, or twenty-eighth from the bottom; my head is I don't know which, no longer on its own shoulders, just like the rest (and vice versa), neither clearly male nor female; whatever it signifies is of no significance, and the Spirit of the Age may just glance its way, at best; my head is statistical, ist consumes its steel per capita globally and with composure; shamelessly predictable, complacently replaceable; as if I didn't even own it in my own and separate way; as if it were one skull of many found unnamed in strip-mined graveyards and preserved so well that one forgets that its owner's gone; where its memories, if any, must reach deep into the future. ------------------------------------ Love at First Sight They're both convinced that a sudden passion joined them. Such centainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still. Since they'd never met before, they're sure that there'd been nothing between them. But what's the word from the streets, staircases, hallways- perhaps they've passed by each other a millioin times? I want to ask them if they don't remember- a moment face to face in some revolving door? perhaps a "sorry" muttered in a crowd? a curt "wrong number" caught in the receiver?- but I know the answer. No, they don't remember. They'd be amazed to hear that Chance has been toying with them now for years. Not quite ready yet to become their Destiny, it pushed them close, drove them apart, it barred their path, stifling a laugh, and then leaped aside. There were signs and signals, even if they couldn't read them yet. Perhaps three years ago or just last Tuesday a certain leaf fluttered from one shoulder to another? Something was dropped and then picked up. Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished into childhood's thicket? There were doorknobs and doorbells where one touch had covered another beforehand. Suitcases checked and standing side by side. One night, perhaps, the same dream, grown hazsy by morning. Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through. ------------------------------------ We're extremely Fortunate We're extremely fortunate notto know percisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, longtime, unquestionably longer than the world itself. Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. Rise above the flesh, which only really knows how to obstruct and make trouble. For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls. From that perspective, one might as well bid farewell to incidents and details. The counting ofweekdays would inevitably seem to be a senseless activity; dropping letters int he mailbox a whim of foolish youth; the sign "No Walking on the Grass" a symptom of lunacy. ------------------------------------ Some People Some people flee some other people. In some country under s asun and some clouds. They abandon something close to all they've got, sown fields, some chickens, dogs, mirrors in which fire now preens. Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles. The emptier they get, the heavier they grow. What happens quietly: someone's dropping from exhaustion. What happens loudly: someon'es bread is ripped away, someone tries to shake a limp child back to life. Always another wrong road ahead of them, always another wrong bridge across an oddly reddish river. Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away, above them a plane seems to circle. Some invisibility would come in handy, some grayish stoniness, or, better yet, some nonexistence for a shorter or a longer while. Something else will happen, only where and what. Someone will come at them, only when and who, in how many shapes, with intentions. If he has a choice, maybe he won't be the enemy and will let them live some sort of life. ------------------------------------ Discovery I believe in the great discovery. I believe in the man who will make the discovery. I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery. I believe in his face going white, his queasiness, his upper lip drenched in cold sweat. I believe in the burning of his notes, burning them into ashes, burning them to the last scrap. I believe in the scattering of numbers, scattering them without regret. I believe in the mans' haste, in the precision of his movements, in his free will. I believe in the shattering of tablets, the pouring our of liquids, the extinguishing of rays. I am convinced this will end well, that it will not be too late, that it will take place without witnesses. I'm sure no one will find out what happened, not the wife, not thw wall, not even the bird that might squeal in its song. I believe in the refusal to take part. I believe in the ruined career. I believe in the wasted years of work. I believe in the secret taken to the grave. These words soar for me beyond all rules without seeking support from actual examples. My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation. ------------------------------------ Writing a resume What needs to be done? Fill out the application and enclose the resume. Regardless of the length of life, a resume is best kept short. Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur. Landscapes are replaced by addresses, shaky memories give way to unshakable dates. Of all your loves, mention only the marriage; of all your children, only those who were born. Who knows you matters more than whom you know. Trips only if taken abroad. Membershipsin what but without why. Honors, but not how they were earned. Write as if ou'd never talked to yourself and always kept yourself at arm's length. Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds, dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams. Price, not worth, and title, not what's inside. His shoesize, not where he's off to, that one you pass off as yourself. In addition, a photograph with one ear showing. What matters is its shape, not what it hears. What is there to hear, anyway? The clatter of paper shredders. ------------------------------------ Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-line illustrations. to the absurdity of writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the overtrustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer the Grimms' fairy tales tothe newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeros on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being. ------------------------------------ Reality Demands Reality demands that we also mention this: Life goes on. It continues at Cannae and Borodino, at Kosovo Polje and Guernica. There's a gas station on a little square in Jericho, and wet paint on park benches in Bila Hora. Letters fly back and forth between Pearl Harbor and Hastings, a moving van passes beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea, and the blooming orchards near Verdun cannot escape the approaching atmosphere front. There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely. Music pours from the yachts moored at Actium and couples dance on their sunlit decks. So much is always going on, that it must be going on all over. Where not a stone still stands, you see the Ice Cream Man besieged by children. Where Hiroshima had been Hiroshima is again, producing many products for everyday use. This errifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile. The grass is green on Maciejowice's fields, and it is studded with dew, as is normal with grass. Perhaps all fiedls are battlefields, those we remember and those that are forgotten: the birch forests and the cedar forests, the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps and the canyons of black defeat, where now, when the need strikes, you dodn't cower under a bushbut squat behind it. What moral flows from this? Probably none. Only the blood flows, drying quickly, and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds. On trgic mountain passes the wind rips hats from unwitting heads and we can't help laughing at that. ------------------------------------ No title required It has come to this: I'm sitting under a tree beside a river on a sunny morning. It's an insignificant event and won't go down in history. It's not battles and pacts, where motives are scrutinized, or noteworthy tyrannicides. And yet I'm sitting by this river, that's a fact. And since I'm here I must have come from somewhere, and before that I must have turned up in many other places, exactly like the conquerors of nations before setting sail. Even a passing moments has its fertile past, its Friday before Sunday, its May before June. Its horizons are no less real than those that a marshal's field glasses might scan. This tree is a poplar that's been rooted here for years. The river is the Raba; it didn't spring up yesterday. The path leading through the bushes wasn't beaten last week. The wind had to blow the clouds here before it could blow them away. And though nothing much is going on nearby, the world is no poorer in details for that. It's just as grounded, just as definite as when migrating races held it captive. Conspiracies aren't the only things shrouded in silence. Retinues of reasons don't trail coronations alone. Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around, but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay. The tapestry of circumstances is intricate and dense. Ants stitching in the grass. The grass sewn into the ground. The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig. So it happens that I am and look. Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air on wings that are its alone, and a shadow skims through my hands that is none other than itself, no one else's but its own. When I see such things, I'm no longer sure that what's important is more important than what's not. ------------------------------------ Parting with a view I don't reproach the spring for starting up again. I can't blame it for doing what it must year after year. I know that my grief will not stop the green. The grass balde may bend but only in the wind. It doesn't pain me to see that clumps of alders above the water have something to rustle with again. I take note of the fact that the shore of a certain lake is still-as if you were living- as lovely as before. I don't resent the view for its vista of a sun-dazzled bay. I am even able to imagine some non-us sitting at this minute on a fallen birch trunk. I respect thier right to whisper, laugh, and lapse into happy silence. I can even allow that they are bound by love and that he holds her with a living arm. Something flreshly birdish starts rustling in the reeds. I sincerely whatn them to hear it. I don't require changes from the surf, now diligent, now sluggish, obeying not me. I expect nothing from the depths near the woods, first emerald, then sapphire, then black. There's one thing I won't agree to: my own return. The privilege of presence- I give it up. I survived you by enough, and only by enough, to contemplate from afar. ------------------------------------ The real world The real word doesn't take flight the way dreams do. No muffled voice, no doorbell can dispel it, no shriek, no crash can cut it short. Images in dreams are hazy and ambiguous, and can generally be explained in many different ways. Reality means reality: that's tougher nut to crack. Dreams have keys. The real world opens on its own and can't be shut. Report canrds and stars pour from it, butterflies and flatiron warmers shower down, headless caps and shards of clouds. Together they form a rebus that can't be solved. Without us dreams couldn't exist. The one on whom the real world depends is still unknown, and the products of his insomnia are avaialble to anyone who wakes up. Dreams aren't crazy- it's the real world that's insane, if only in the stubbornness with which it sticks to the current of events. In dreams our recently deceased are still alive, in perfect health, no less, and restored to the full bloom of youth. The real world lays the corpse in front of us. The real world doesn't blink an eye. Dreams are featherweights, and memory can shake them off with ease. The real world doesn't have to fear forgetfulness. It's a tough customer. It sits on our shoulders, weights on our hearts, tumbles to our feet. There's no escaping it, it tags along each time we flee. And there's no stop along our escape route where reality isn't expecting us. ------------------------------------ Nothing's a gift Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan. I'm drowning in debts up to my ears. I'll have to pay for myself with my self, give up my life for my life. Here's how it's arranged: The heart can be repossessed, the liver, too, and each single finger and toe. Too late to tear up the terms, my debts will be repaid, and I'll be fleeced, or, more precisely, flayed. I move about the planet in a crush of other debtors. Some are saddled with the burden of paying off their wings. Others must, willy-nilly, account for every leaf. Every tissue in us lies on the debit side. Not a tentacle or tendril is for keeps. The inventory, infinitely detailed, implies we'll be left not just empty-handed but handless, too. I can't remember where, when and why I let someon open this account in my name. We call the protest against this the soul. And it's the only item not included on the list. ------------------------------------ Maybe all this Maybe all this is happening in some lab? Under one lamp by day and billions by night? Maybe we're experimental generations? Poured from one vial to the next, shaken in test tubes, not scrutinized by eyes alone, each of us separately plucked up by tweezers in the end? Or maybe it's more like this: No interference? The changes occur on their own according to plan? The graph's needle slowly etches its predictable zigzag? Maybe thus far we arent' of much interest? The control monitors aren't usually plugged in? Only for wars, preferably large ones, for the odd ascent above our chump of Earth, for major migrations from point A to B? Maybe just the opposite: They've got a taste for trivia up there? Look! on the big screen a little girl in sweing a button on her sleeve. The radar shrieks, the s taff comes at a run. What a darling little being with its tiny heart beating inside it! How sweet, its solemn threading of the needle! Someone cries enraptured: Get the Boss, tell him he's got to see this for himself! ------------------------------------ Seance Happenstance reveals its tricks. It produces, by sleight of hand, a glass of brandy and sits Henry down beside it. I enter the bistro and stop dead in my tracks. Henry-he's none other than Adges's husband's brother, and Agnes is related to Aunt Sophie's brother-in-law. It turns out we've got the same great-grandfather. In happenstance's hands space furls and unfurls, spreads and shrinks. The tablecloth becomes a handkerchief. Just guess who I ran into in Canada, of all places, after all these years. I thought he was dead, and there he was, in Mercedes. On the plane to Athens At a stadium in Tokyo. Happenstance twirls a kaleidoscope in its hands. A billion bits of colored glass glitter. And suddenly Jack's glass bumps into Jill's. Just imagine, in this very same hotel. I turn around and see- it's really she! Face to face in an elevator. In a toy store. At the corner of Maple and Pine. Happenstance is shrouded in a cloak. Things get lost in it and dthen are found again. I stumbled on it accidentally. I bent down and picked it up. One look and I knew it, a spoon from that stolen service. If it hadn't been for that bracelet, I would never have known Alexandra. The clock? It turned up Potterville. Happenstance looks deep into our eyes. Our head grows heavy. Our eyelids drop. We want to laugh and cry, it's so incredible. From fourth-grade homeroom to that ocean liner. It has to mean something. To hell and back, and here we meet halfway home. We want to shout: Small world! You could almost hug it! And for a moment we are filled with joy, radiant and deceptive. ------------------------------------ Hatred See how efficient it still is, how it keeps itself in shape- our century's hatred. How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles. How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down. It's not like other feelings. At once both older and younger. It gives birth itself to the reasons that give it life. When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest. And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it. One religion or another- whatever gets it ready, in position. One fatherland or another- whatever helps it get a running start. Justice also works well at the outset until hate gets its own momentum going. Hatred. Hatred. Its face twisted in a grimace of erotic ecstasy. Oh these other feelings, listless weaklings. Since when does brotherhood draw crowds? Has compassion ever finished first? Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble? Only hatred has just what it takes. Gifted, diligent, hardworking. Need we mention all the songs it has composed? All the pages it has added to our history books? All the human carpets it has spread over countless city squares and football fields? Let's face it: it knows how to make beauty. The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies. Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns. You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins and a certain bawdy humor to be found in the sturdy column jutting from their midst. Hatred is a master of contrast- between explosions and dead quiet, red blood and white snow. Above all, it never tires of its leitmotif-the impeccable executioner towering over its soiled victim. It's always ready for new challenges. If it has to wait awhile, it will. They say it's blind. Blind? It has a sniper's keen sight and gazes unflinchingly at the future as only it can. ------------------------------------ Elegiac Calculation How many of those I knew (if I really knew them), men, women (if the distinction still holds) have crossed that threshold (if it is a threshold) passed over that bridge (if you can call it a bridge)- How many, after a shorter or longer life (if they still see a difference), good, because it's beginning, bad, because it's over (if they don't prefer the reverse), have found themselves on the far shore (if they found themselves at all and if another shore exists)- I've been given no assurance as concerns their future fate (if there is one common fate and if it is fate)- It's all (if that word's not too confining) behind them now (if not before them)- How many of them leaped from rushing time and vanished, ever more mournfully, in the distance (if you put stock in perspective)- How many (if the question makes sense, if one can verify a final sum without including oneself) have sunk into that deepest sleep (if there's nothing deeper)- See you soon. See you tomorrow. See you next time. They don't want (if they don't want) to say that anymore. They've given themselves up to endless (if not otherwise) silence. They're only concerned with that (if only that) which their absence demands. ------------------------------------