This Mutilated World

 

Without End by Adam Zagajewski

A collection of collections, Without End includes poems from various collections of Zagajewski’s poetry, including New Poems, Early Poems, Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism For Beginners.

Here is a small sampling of what you’ll find:

Good Friday in the Tunnels of the Métro

Jews of various religions meet

In the tunnels of the Métro, rosary beads

Spilled from someone’s tender fingers.

Above them priests sleep after their Lenten supper,

Above them the pyramids of synagogues and churches

Stand like the rocks a glacier left behind.

I listened to the St. Matthew Passion,

Which transforms pain into beauty,

I read the Death Fugue by Celan

Transforming pain into beauty.

In the tunnels of the Métro no transformation of pain,

It is there, it persists and is keen.

Song of an Emigré

We come into being in alien cities.

We call them native but not for long.

We are allowed to admire their walls and spires.

From east to west we go, and in front of us

rolls the huge circle of flaming

sun through which, nimbly, as in a circus,

a tame lion jumps. In alien cities

we look at the work of Old Masters

and we recognize our faces in the old

paintings without surprise. We lived

before and we even knew suffering,

we lacked only words. At the Orthodox

church in Paris, the last White

gray-haired Russians pray to God, who

is centuries younger than they and equally

helpless. In alien cities we’ll

remain, like trees, like stones.

Try To Praise the Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June’s long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish  yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,

you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland in 1945. Considered one of the “Generation of ‘68” or “New Wave” writers in Poland, he has written numerous collections of both poetry and prose. He lives in France.

  

                                               Peter Adam Nash