Poetry &Sprituality Entropy | 27 Apr 2009
Sky
Wislawa Szymborska‘s poetry speaks about enduring and irreversible coordinates of human fate— love, striving, fear of pain, hope, the fleeting nature of things…
Sky..
We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and with nothing more,
beyond it.
I don’t have to wait for a starry night
nor crane my neck
to look at the sky.
I have the sky at my back, close at hand, and on my eyelids.
It is the sky that wraps me tight
and lifts me from beneath.
The highest mountains
are no closer than the sky than the deepest
valleys to the sky
No place has any more of it
than any other place.
A cloud is as ruthlessly crushed by sky as grave is.
A mole is as high, sky high
as an owl beating its wings.
Whatever falls into the abyss,
falls from the sky into sky.
Friable, fluid, rocky,
fiery and volatile
stretches of of sky, specks of sky,
gusts and heaps of sky.
Sky is omnipresent
even in darkness under the skin.
I eat sky, I excrete sky.
I am a trap in a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant,
an embrace embraced,
a question that answers a question.
Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at more precise address–
were I to be searched for
I would be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.
By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak.
on 28 Apr 2009 at 1:45 am 1.Magda said …
Thanks to you I discover her insight, thank you!
on 09 May 2009 at 1:05 pm 2.Nimesh said …
One does not know what to say when one reads Wislawa, especially a poem like “SKY” Perhaps Transcendental shall sum it up…
With the word “SKY” , a world she atolls is so fluid yet intricate in its details. The first para itself transcends one it an archetypal childhood,
where the “us” isn’t separated from the “Me”. As if the Earth is part of the Sky and Sky is part of Earth.
“We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and with nothing more,
beyond it”
The poem flows like a gentle river meeting the sea whose waves thrash the rocks and forming a million islands
“Friable, fluid, rocky,
fiery and volatile
stretches of of sky, specks of sky,
gusts and heaps of sky.”
Nimesh