Czeslaw Milosz

I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple treetranslucent in brightness.
And when I looked out at dawn once again, an apple tree laden withfruit stood there.
Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of…

A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?
A one-man crew of a fortress in the sand?
Whoever he was.
At dawn he saw furrowed mountains The color of ashes, above the melting darkness

You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line,
Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,

It does not know it
It does not know it
It does not know it is this not that.
And, more and more often, agape

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.
Desire will not save the morality of God.
If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,
And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity

Winter came as it does in this valley.
After eight dry months rain fell And the mountains, straw-colored, turned green for a while.
In the canyons where gray laurels Graft their stony roots to granite,
Streams must have filled the…

Maidenly lake, fathomless lake,
Stay as you were once, overgrown with rushes,
Idling with a reflected cloud, for my
Whom your shore no longer touches.

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I enteredthe clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

Love means to learn to look at
The way one looks at distant
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart

You whom I could not
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

This happened long ago, before the onset of universal genetic correctness.
Boys and girls would stand naked before mirrors studying the defects of their structure.
Nose too long, ears like burdocks, sunken chin just like a…

The pungent smells of a California winter,
Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.
I add logs to the fire,
I drink and I ponder. “In Ilawa,” the news item said, “at age 70 Died Aleksander Rymkiewicz, poet.” He was…

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

Stalking a deer I wandered deep into the mountains and from there I saw.
Or perhaps it was for some other reason that I rose above the setting sun.
Above the hills of blackwood and a slab of ocean and the steps of a glacier,…

On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.

When everything was
And the notion of sin had
And the earth was
In universal

In grayish doubt and black despair,
I drafted hymns to the earth and the air,
pretending to joy, although I lacked it.
The age had made lament redundant.

My valiant helper, a small-sized
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer,
Unaware that you insult his tribe.
Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole.

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it,
Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.

I sleep a lot and read St.
Thomas
Or The Death of God (that's a Protestant book).
To the right the bay as if molten tin

All my life to pretend this world of theirs is
And to know such pretending is disgraceful.
But what can I do?
Suppose I suddenly

In Rome on the Campo di
Baskets of olives and lemons,
Cobbles spattered with
And the wreckage of flowers.

Forget the
You caused others.
Forget the
Others caused you.