Life You're Beautiful (I Say)
“Life you’re beautiful (I say)
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingalely,
more anthillful or sprout sprouting.”
Reading Wislawa Szymborska is to find yourself in intimate conversation with a poet with an enormous capacity for empathy and a consciousness where the aperture is always wide open.
I first became aware of her work in the days after 9/11 when we New Yorkers were staggering in a metaphysical sense, trying to find some way to process what had happened, what was still happening all around us.
There were many ways in which we tried to do that, turning to religion, art, culture, politics and journalism to provide passage through dark days. Poetry was one path that spoke to many people, crossing divides that other paths like religion and politics couldn’t begin to approach.
Szymborska’s poem, “Falling From the Sky” surfaced in this context, read at a fundraiser, and later quoted in the New York Times.
““Magic is dying out, although the heights
still pulse with its vast force. On August nights
you can’t be sure what is falling from the sky:
a star? Or something else that still belongs on high?”
Published in 1972, it was eerily prescient of that September day in 2001. Later she wrote another poem, Photographs of 9/11, explicitly in memory of the events of that day.
© 2012 Peggy Doyle
Wislawa Szymborska writes frequently about the aftereffects of war, the fallout of war on the innocents, particularly as has been experienced in her native Poland and Eastern Europe. Given the dark and troubling events around the world these last few weeks, I've found myself taking her books down from my shelf again.
And yet, while she did not turn away from the realities of the dark events of her own time and place in history, she also did not give up her sense of awe and wonder, or her miraculous ability to give voice to the important truths of our existence, truths that only poets and artists can reveal.
The New York Times says it best, "Szymborska’s skepticism, her merry, mischievous irreverence and her thirst for the surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind — free, restless, questioning, in every way the opposite of the terrorist who plagues civilized life in our time."
Her theme is of the triumph of the human spirit, the triumph of the collective spirit of the world, reminding us of what we need to hold on to and hold dear. This excerpt from her lecture at the Nobel Ceremony in 1996, where she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, speaks to that belief.
“The world – whatever we might think when we’re terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we’re embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, of animals, and perhaps even plants (for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain?); whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead, still dead, we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserve tickets, but tickets whose life span is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing.
But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”
“I might have been myself minus amazement, / that is, / someone completely different," she wrote.
Oh, how lucky we are that she was her luminous, brilliant self, amazement intact.
Photo Credits:
- Green sprouts, Pix Database
- Big Sur Stars, December 11, 2012, P. Doyle