You, Czeslaw,
like a brook of the earth,
welling up to the skies and more,
swelling up even to the sun and the stars
and all unknown, uncounted galaxies
and more, more than we can yet know
or ever will, till in timeless space
we dwell in a place where
our tears mingle with your own,
making of themselves and all
their visions and their dreams,
one endless, downpouring stream,
breaking through both time and space,
cleansing, clearing perhaps one small part
of one small heart of the human tendency
to be a living witness of evil, and not care.
2006 July 11
Bricabrac. Old and sick in Krakow, Czeslaw complained of his to a fellow (Irish) Nobelista. My fate too (though I am not a poet, I think, and so do I deserve it?)? Like alphabet soup. Lots of letters. Enough to make a small book. Swimming, refusing to join others in the sparest, most economic, incarnation - a monosyllabic word. Let alone a sentence that might be read front to back. Bricabrac.
2016 June 29
Reason: It saves austere
and transparent phrases
from the filthy discord
of tortured words—opens
congealed fists of the past.
All is new—the bright sun
*Mathematics&Poetry—based on a mathematical square: the number of syllables in a line equals the number of lines.
Adapted from poetry by Czeslaw Milosz
...inspired by 'Encounter' by Czeslaw Milosz
The station wagon carried us through the misty morning.
A sudden flash betrayed the rabbit.
Its loping gait, gray to blend with the dawn,
the creature clipped the churning wheels as my companion pointed,
and was gone.
Now gone forever. A memory only, the man and the animal,
living in my dreams.
Where did they go?
Sound and sight consumed me.
Concern occupied my thoughts. We traveled on.
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