Poem In Your Pocket Day 2024: "The End and the Beginning" by Wisława Szymborska

For today's Poem In Your Pocket Day, part of National Poetry Month, I am sharing this sober slice of poetica vérité by the wonderful Polish writer Wisława Szymborska, born 1923 and died in 2012. She was probably thinking of another war when she wrote this, but here we are in 2024, wars, wars, everywhere...the one thing our planet has never had a shortage of.

The End and the Beginning
by Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.