What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins

Of St. John’s Cathedral this sunny

Day in spring?

What are you thinking here, where the wind

Blowing from the Vistula scatters

The red dust of the rubble?

You swore never to be

A ritual mourner.

You swore never to touch

The deep wounds of your nation

So you would not make them holy

With the accursed holiness that pursues

Descendants for many centuries.

But the lament of Antigone

Searching for her brother

Is indeed beyond the power

Of endurance. And the heart

Is a stone in which is enclosed,

Like an insect, the dark love

Of a most unhappy land.

I did not want to love so.

That was not my design.

I did not want to pity so.

That was not my design.

My pen is lighter

Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden

Is too much for it to bear.

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?

I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot

Write anything; five hands

Seize my pen and order me to write

The story of their lives and deaths.

Was I born to become

a ritual mourner?

I want to sing of festivities,

The greenwood into which Shakespeare

Often took me. Leave

To poets a moment of happiness,

Otherwise your world will perish.

It’s madness to live without joy

And to repeat to the dead

Whose part was to be gladness

Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts

Only the two salvaged words:

Truth and justice.