Posts
At four a.m. this morning, I happened to be awake and reading Szymborska's poems (in a Polish dual-language edition, with translations by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire), when I came across her poem "Four in the morning".
It finishes:
"The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning -
three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living".
A great poet. She deserved her Nobel Prize.
Soon after seven a.m. I was on my bicycle, heading for my regular walk up to Maiden Castle - a beautiful sunny morning.
But as Szyborska writes in "Travel Elegy":
"All is mine but nothing owned,
nothing owned for memory,
and mine only while I look".
She writes about travel and landscapes enjoyed:
"I won't retain one blade of grass
in sharp contour.
Greeting and farewell
in a single glance..."
All is mine but nothing owned,
nothing owned for memory,
and mine only while I look.
No comments:
Post a Comment