Poem for the Weekend

 

This week's poem comes from a pillar of poetry, the Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska. She is known for her political poems--her lifespan took her from the effects of World War II and Stalinism through to twenty-first-century Poland--but she also wrote personal poems like this one. Here's a link to her 2012 obituary, which gives a good overview of her life and work.


Some Like Poetry

by Wislawa Szymborska

Some -
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
and poets themselves,
there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry -
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.