The End and the Beginning

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.

Wislawa Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning ” from Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Featured image by Otto Dix

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Wislawa Szymborska Written by:

Wislawa Szymborska (pron. Vishwava Zhimborska) was born in Poland in 1923. She lived through the Germans' occupation of Poland (and defied them by going to illegal classes). Then she lived under an oppressive Communist regime - not always pleasing its officials with her poetry. In 1996 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature , one of the few women to receive it. Szymborska died at home in Kraków in 2012, aged 88.

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