The Collected Poems

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The Collected Poems Page 18

by Zbigniew Herbert


  beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring

  the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

  the light on a wall the splendor of the sky

  they do not need your warm breath

  they are there to say: no one will console you

  Keep watch—when a light on a hill gives a sign—rise and go

  as long as the blood is still turning the dark star in your breast

  repeat humanity’s old incantations fairy tales and legends

  for that is how you will attain the good you will not attain

  repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

  like those who crossed a desert and perished in the sand

  for this they will reward you with what they have at hand

  with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

  go for only thus will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

  to the company of your forefathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

  the defenders of the kingdom without bounds and the city of ashes

  Be faithful Go

  REPORT FROM A BESIEGED CITY

  1983

  FOR KASIA

  WHAT I SAW

  In memory of Kazimierz Moczarski

  I saw prophets tearing their false beards

  I saw frauds joining sects of flagellants

  executioners in sheep’s clothing

  who fled the people’s wrath

  playing shepherd’s pipes

  I saw it I saw it

  I saw a man subjected to torture

  he sat safely now with his family

  telling jokes eating soup

  I looked at his parted lips

  his gums—two blackthorn twigs stripped of bark

  it was shameless beyond all words

  I saw the whole nakedness

  the whole humiliation

  then

  the academy

  a lot of people flowers

  a stuffy room

  a man went on about distortions

  I thought of his distorted mouth

  is this the final act

  of a play by Anonymous

  spread out flat as a shroud

  filled with muffled sobs

  and the giggles of those

  who heaving a sigh of relief

  that they pulled it off again

  after dead props are cleared

  slowly

  lift

  the bloody curtain

  FROM THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

  Obviously

  they who stand at the top of the stairs

  they know

  they know everything

  we on the other hand

  sweepers of city squares

  hostages of a better future

  to whom they at the top of the stairs

  appear only rarely

  always with a finger held to their lips

  we are patient

  our wives mend our Sunday shirts

  we talk about food rationing

  about football the price of shoes

  on Saturday we put our feet up

  and we drink

  we aren’t the sort

  who make a fist

  clank their chains

  talk and question

  incite to rebellion

  seized by a fever

  always talking and questioning

  here’s what they’re trying to sell us—

  we throw ourselves on the stairs

  and take them by force

  the heads of those at the top

  will tumble down the steps

  and finally we will behold

  the view from the heights

  what future

  what void

  we don’t want the sight

  of rolling heads

  we know how quickly the heads grow back

  and at the top there’s always

  one man left or three of them

  and at the foot a heap of brooms and shovels

  at times we dream

  those at the top of the stairs

  come down

  down to us

  where we are chewing bread reading the paper

  and say unto us

  —let’s talk

  man to man

  it isn’t true what the posters proclaim

  we carry truth in our tight mouths

  it’s cruel and burdensome

  so we’ll bear it on our own

  we are not happy

  we’d like to stay

  down here

  sure they’re dreams

  they may come true

  or not come true

  so we will go on

  cultivating

  our square of earth

  our square of stone

  with light heads

  a cigarette tucked behind an ear

  not a drop of hope in our hearts

  1956

  MR COGITO’S SOUL

  In former times

  as we know from history

  it left the body

  when the heart stood still

  with the final breath

  it quietly withdrew

  to celestial meadows

  Mr Cogito’s soul

  behaves differently

  it leaves his living body

  without a parting word

  for months years it cavorts

  on other continents

  beyond Mr Cogito’s borders

  its address is hard to come by

  it doesn’t really stay in touch

  it avoids contact

  writes no letters

  no one knows when it will be back

  perhaps it has gone away to stay

  Mr Cogito tries to vanquish

  his base feeling of jealousy

  he thinks well of his soul

  he thinks of it tenderly

  it must have a life

  in other bodies too

  there are not enough souls

  for the whole of humanity

  Mr Cogito accepts his fate

  he has no other alternative

  he even tries to say

  —my soul my own—

  he thinks of his soul fondly

  he thinks of it with tenderness

  so when it turns up

  quite unexpectedly

  he doesn’t greet it by saying

  —good thing you came back

  he merely looks askance

  when it sits at the mirror

  and brushes its hair

  tangled and gray

  LAMENT

  In memory of my mother

  And now she has brown clouds of roots overhead

  a rank lily of salt on her temples a rosary of sand

  and sails on the bottom of a boat in a foamy mist

  a mile away where there is a bend in the river

  —visible—invisible—like the light on a wave

  she is truly no different—abandoned like us all

  TO THE RIVER

  O river—hourglass of water figure of eternity

  I step in your stream more and more changed

  so that I might be a cloud a fish or stone cliff

  and you are changeless like a clock measuring

  the body’s metamorphoses and the spirit’s fall

  the gradual disintegration of tissues and love

  I born of clay

  want to be your pupil

  to know the heart Olympian spring

  cool procession murmuring column

  bedrock of my faith and my despair

  teach me stubbornness and endurance

  so that I shall deserve in the last hour

  to repose in the shade of a great delta

  in a holy triangle of beginning and end

  OLD MASTERS

  The Old Masters

  did without names

  atheir signatures were

  the whit
e fingers of the Madonna

  or the pink towers

  di città sul mare

  also scenes from the life

  della Beata Umiltà

  they dissolved

  in sogno

  miracolo

  crocifissione

  they found shelter

  under angels’ eyelids

  behind hillocks of cloud

  in the thick grass of paradise

  drowned completely

  in golden firmaments

  without a cry of terror

  or clamor for memory

  their paintings’ surfaces

  are smooth as a mirror

  they are not mirrors for us

  but mirrors for the chosen

  I invoke you Old Masters

  in hard moments of doubt

  let pride’s serpent scales

  fall from me by your aid

  let me remain unmoved

  by temptations of fame

  I invoke you Old Masters

  Painter of the Rain of Manna

  Painter of the Embroidered Trees

  Painter of the Visitation

  Painter of the Sacred Blood

  PRAYER OF THE TRAVELER MR COGITO

  Lord

  I thank You for creating the world beautiful and various

  and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which were not the sites of my daily torments

  —that at night in Tarquinia I lay in the square by the well and a gunmetal pendulum rang out from the tower Your wrath or forgiveness

  and that a little donkey on the island Corkyra sang to me from the unfathomable bellows of its lungs the melancholy of the landscape

  and that in the ugly city of Manchester I discovered kindhearted and sensible people

  nature repeated its wise tautologies: the forest was a forest the sea the sea a cliff a cliff

  stars revolved and it was as it ought to be—Iovis omnia plena

  —forgive me—that I thought only of myself while the lives of others cruel and inexorable turned around me like the great astrological clock of St Pierre in Beauvais

  that I was lazy distracted too timid in labyrinths and caves

  and forgive me also that I did not fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of oppressed peoples and studied only the rising moon and museums

  —I thank You that works created for Your greater glory yielded to me particles of their mystery and that with great presumption I thought that Duccio Van Eyck and Bellini painted for me also

  and also that the Acropolis which I never fully understood patiently revealed to me its mutilated body

  —I ask You to reward the gray old woman who unbidden brought me fruit from her garden on the sunburned native island of the son of Laertes

  and Miss Helen of the foggy island of Mull in the Hebrides for offering Greek hospitality and asking me to leave a lamp lit at night in the window facing Holy Iona so that the lights of earth would greet each other

  and also all those who gave me directions and said kato kyrie kato

  and take under Your protection Mama from Spoleto Spiridion from Paxos the good student from Berlin who saved me from oppression and then when met unexpectedly in Arizona drove me to the Grand Canyon which is like a hundred throusand cathedrals standing on their heads

  —Lord let me not think of my moist-eyed gray deluded persecutors when the sun sets on the truly indescribable Ionian Sea

  let me understand other people other languages other sufferings and above all let me be humble that is to say one who longs for the source

  I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness

  MR COGITO—THE RETURN

  1

  Mr Cogito

  decided to return

  to the stony lap

  of his fatherland

  the decision is dramatic

  he will regret it greatly

  he can however no longer

  stand the colloquial turns

  —comment allez-vous

  —wie geht’s

  —how are you

  questions apparently simple

  require convoluted answers

  Mr Cogito will rip off

  bandages of kind indifference

  he has lost all faith in progress

  he cares about his own wound

  displays of abundance

  fill him with boredom

  he grew fond only

  of a Doric column

  a church in San Clemente

  a portrait of a certain lady

  a book he never finished

  and a few other little items

  so he returns

  he now sees

  the border

  a plowed field

  murderous watchtowers

  a thicket of barbed wire

  without a whisper

  a bulletproof door

  closes slowly behind him

  now

  he is

  alone

  in the treasure house

  of all misfortune

  2

  so why does he return

  he is asked by friends

  from the better world

  he might stay here

  somehow settle in

  entrust his wound

  to the dry cleaner

  leave it in the lounge

  of an enormous airport

  so why does he return

  —to childhood waters

  —to his tangled roots

  —to memory’s embrace

  —to the hand the face

  burned on time’s grate

  questions apparently simple

  require convoluted answers

  perhaps Mr Cogito returns

  to give an answer

  to promptings of terror

  to impossible happiness

  to a blow out of the blue

  to a treacherous question

  MR COGITO AND THE IMAGINATION

  1

  Mr Cogito has never trusted

  the tricks of the imagination

  the piano at the top of the Alps

  played concerts false to his ear

  he had no regard for labyrinths

  the Sphinx filled him with disgust

  he lived in a cellarless house

  without mirrors or dialectics

  jungles of tangled images

  were never his homeland

  he rarely got carried away

  on the wings of a metaphor

  he then plunged like Icarus

  into the arms of the Great Mother

  he adored tautologies

  explanations

  idem per idem

  a bird is a bird

  slavery slavery

  a knife a knife

  death is death

  he loved

  a flat horizon

  a straight line

  earth’s gravity

  2

  Mr Cogito

  will be counted

  among the species minores

  he will receive indifferently

  the verdict of men of letters

  he employed the imagination

  for wholly different purposes

  he wanted to make of it

  an instrument of compassion

  he longed to understand fully

  —Pascal’s night

  —the nature of a diamond

  —the prophets’ melancholy

  —the wrath of Achilles

  —the fury of mass murderers

  —the dreams of Mary Stuart

  —the fear of Neanderthals

  —the last Aztecs’ despair

  —Nietzsche’s long dying

  —the Lascaux painter’s joy

  —the rise and fall of an oak

  —the rise and fall of Rome

  in order to revive the dead
>
  and maintain the covenant

  Mr Cogito’s imagination

  moves like a pendulum

  it runs with great precision

  from suffering to suffering

  there is no place in it

  for poetry’s artifical fires

  he wants to be true

  to uncertain clarity

  IN MEMORIAM NAGY LÁSZLÓ

  Romana said you just passed away

  as is said of those who stay forever

  I envy you your marble face

  between us things were pure no letters

  no memories nothing to catch the eye

  no rings or pitchers

  or women’s laments

  it makes it easier to trust my sudden joy

  that you are now just like Attila József

  Mickiewicz Lord Byron the handsome ghosts

  who always turn up for an appointed meeting

  my widower’s touch could not get used to it

  a predatory love of the concrete demanded tribute

  we never filled a dead room with laughter

  we never leaned our elbows on a table’s rustling oak

  we never shared a bottle of wine or the bread of fate

  even though we dwelled together

  in the hospice of Cross and Rose

  the space dividing us is like a shroud

  the evening’s darkness disperses falls

  the noble have faces of water and earth

  our further life together will no doubt take shape

  more geometrico—two unbending parallel lines

  unearthly patience and inhuman fidelity

  TO RYSZARD KRYNICKI—A LETTER

  Not much will remain Ryszard in truth not much

  of the poetry of our mad century Rilke Eliot sure

  a few other worthy shamans who knew the secret

  of word spells time-resistant forms without which

  no phrase deserves memory and speech is like sand

  our school notebooks subjected to earnest torture

  with their traces of sweat tears and blood will be

  to the eternal proofreader a song without a score

  nobly righteous and all too self-evident

  we came too easily to believe beauty does not save

  that it leads wantons from dream to dream to death

  none of us was able to wake the dryad of a poplar

  or to decipher the handwriting of the clouds

  that is why no unicorn will stray across our tracks

  we’ll raise up no ship in the bay no peacock no rose

 

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