Friday, September 19, 2014

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.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing.
    She had such amazing humour.
    Love the one called 'Possibilities.'

    ReplyDelete

"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka