A Taste of Poetry

I was in a poetry mood today and I felt the need to write down some of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Czeslaw Milosz. He has such a way with words.
I wish I could write so beautifully…

Love
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things

So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn't always understand.

One More Contradiction

Did I fulfill what I had to, here, on earth?

I was a guest in a house under white clouds

Where rivers flow and grasses renew themselves.

So what if I were called, if I was hardly aware.

The next time early I would search for wisdom.I

would not pretend I could be just like the others:

Only evil and suffering come from that.

Renouncing, I would choose the fate of obedience.

I would suppress my wolf’s eye and greedy throat.

A resident of some cloister floating in the air

With a view on the cities glowing below,

Or onto a stream, a bridge and old cedars,

I would give myself to one task only.

Which then, however, could not be accomplished.

So Little

I said so little.

Days were short.

Short days.

Short nights.

Short years.

I said so little.

I couldn't keep up.

My heart grew weary

From joy,

Despair,

Ardor,

Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan

Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores

Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world

Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don't know

What in all that was real.

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

It puts what should be above things as they are,

Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.

It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,

Giving us the estate of the world to manage.

It saves austere and transparent phrases

From the filthy discord of tortured words.

It says that everything is new under the sun,

Opens the congealed fist of the past.

Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.

As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,

The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.

Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

To Raja Rao

Raja, I wish I knew

the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept

the place I was in.

I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices

lacked the quality of presence.

I would live by the hope of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,

of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

Link, if you wish, my peculiar case

(on the border of schizophrenia)

to the messianic hope

of my civilization.

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,

in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.

Building in my mind a permanent polis

forever deprived of aimless bustle.

I learned at last to say: this is my home,

here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,

on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,

in a great republic, moderately corrupt.

Raja, this did not cure me

of my guilt and shame.

A shame of failing to be

what I should have been.

The image of myself

grows gigantic on the wall

and against it

my miserable shadow.

That's how I came to believe

in Original Sin

which is nothing but the first

victory of the ego.

Tormented by my ego, deluded by it I

give you, as you see, a ready argument.

I hear you saying that liberation is possible

and that Socratic wisdom

is identical with your guru's.

No, Raja, I must start from what I am. I

am those monsters which visit my dreams

and reveal to me my hidden essence.

If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever

that man is a healthy creature.

Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness

had to make our agony only more acute.

We needed God loving us in our weakness

and not in the glory of beatitude.

No help, Raja, my part is agony,

struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,

prayer for the Kingdom

and reading Pascal.