It was either my mom or dad who came home with View With a Grain of Sand for me. I can’t remember now. I was in high school. They had probably picked it up off of a prime shelf at Barnes and Noble or something because that was the year that Ms. Szymborska had won The Nobel Prize and that was probably the only year that one of Ms. Szymborska’s books would occupy a prime shelf at Barnes and Noble.  

In high school, and maybe even still, I only had a vague notion of what might be regarded as “good poetry”. But man when I opened up that book, that was the first time I read poetry that was moving. Like, really, really moving. And I’ve still got that book somewhere. 

So, in honor of Ms. Szymborska (whose name I still can’t really pronounce) here is a bad sketch. And below one of her wonderful poems. 

A Few Words on the Soul
 We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh