A Poem by Wislawa Symborska

Here's a poem from Wislawa Symborska, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.  Fellow Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (who I'll be writing about a lot in the next few days) penned this lovely essay regarding her work, quoted briefly below:  

"In Szymborska's poetry the "we" denotes all of us living on this planet now, joined by a common consciousness, a "post-consciousness," post-Copernican, post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, post-two-World-Wars, post-crimes-and-inventions-of-the-twentieth-century. It is a serious and bold enterprise to venture a diagnosis, that is, to try to say who we are, what we believe in, and what we think."

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble 
to the sides of the road, 
so the corpse-laden wagons 
can pass.

Someone has to get mired 
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door. 

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left 
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged 
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was. 
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about 
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths 
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth 
gazing at the clouds.