Wislawa Szymborska

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Written by: Faith

True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

I came across this lovely poem in the net, and thought that i'll google it to find the owner. After some researching, I found out that the author was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, Wislawa Szymborska.


She was born in July 2, 1923 in Kórnik, Poland. Her occupations were being a translator, essayist and lastly, a Polish Poet. Szymborska frequently employs literary devices such as irony, paradox, contradiction, and understatement to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions.

Szymborska's reputation rests on a relatively small body of work: she has not published more than 250 poems to date.

In 1931, Szymborska's family moved to Kraków. She studied, worked and stayed in this city. When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground lessons. From 1943, she worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced labourer. It was during this time that her career as an artist began with illustrations for an English-language textbook. She also began writing stories and occasional poems.

In 1945, she took up classes on the Polish language and Literature before switching to socialogy in Jagiellonian University. In March 1945, she published her first poem Szukam słowa ("I seek the word") in the daily paper Dziennik Polski; her poems continued to be published in various newspapers and periodicals for a number of years. She quitted her studies in 1948 without a degree as the school fees were tearing up her pocket. In the the same year, she married poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954.

She was awarded many prizes and awards, and let everyone enjoy another poem of hers.

Going Home

He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He's nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother's womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he'll give a lecture
on homeostasis in metagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

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Article Posted: Saturday, January 03, 2009 at 13:08.
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