Life &Poetry Entropy | 22 Feb 2009
Autotomy
Wislawa Szymborska is a philosophically inflected poet who investigates unanswerable questions with immense élan and delicacy. This particular poem has deeper meaning and inferences in philosophy, biology and psychology. Like all her poems, this one takes us to the edge of an abyss.
The title “Autotomy” is biological term for the capacity of certain living things, to give up wholeness in order to preserve life.
Autotomy..
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two:
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.
An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.
Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.
If there are scales, the pans don’t move.
If there is justice, this is it.
To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.
We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.
The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.
Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar -
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers.
The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us
© By Wislawa Szymborska
- Non omnis moriar, “Not all of me will die,” are the opening words of Horace, Ode 3.30. By Polish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka