Friday Night Poetry

A lot has changed in our country in the last twenty-five years during the period when the American right has been rising to power. I've been thinking lately about some of the promise of our nation that we have left behind on this strange journey we as a nation have been taking. Maybe it's against my better judgment, but I keep writing in an effort to bring back some of that promise.

Tonight, I'm posting another poem by the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz. The upheavels he witnessed were much greater than the ones we have experienced but his poem carries well into our time. He wrote the following brief poem in 1936 but he published it nine years later, after World War II, when it clearly took on a diffferent meaning.


Encounter


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.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive.
Not the hare, not the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.


—Czeslaw Milosz (1936)