Some of these poems were mentioned in Roshi Susan’s recent talk for our Online Zen Group: Taking Part in the Gathering. Click here for more information about Anna Swir. These examples were translated by Czelaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan.
BEACH SANDALS
I swam away from myself.
Do not call me.
Swim away from yourself, too.We will swim away, leaving our bodies
on the shore
like a pair of beach sandals.
LOVE WITH RUCKSACKS
Two rucksacks,
two grey heads.
And the roads of all the world
for wandering.
A DOUBLE RAPTURE
Because there is no me
and because I feel
how much there is no me.
I PROTEST
Dying
is the hardest
work of all.The old and sick
should be exempt from it.
ANXIETY
You make among the trees
a nest for our love.
But look at the flowers
you’ve crushed.
I AM FILLED WITH LOVE
I am filled with love
as a great tree with the wind,
as a sponge with the ocean,
as a great life with suffering,
as time with death.
I CANNOT
I envy you. Every moment
You can leave me.I cannot
leave myself.
SAD LOVERS
Like an eye and an eyelid
United by a tear.
THERE IS A LIGHT IN ME
Whether in daytime or in nighttime
I always carry inside
a light.
In the middle of noise and turmoil
I carry silence.
Always I carry light and silence.
THAT WOULD NOT BE GOOD
When I am alone
I am afraid to turn
too quickly.What is behind my back
may not, after all, be ready
to take a shape suitable
for human eyes.And that would not be good.
THING INDESCRIBABLE
Out of suffering, power is born.
Out of power, suffering is born.Two words for one
indescribable
thing
TO THAT WHICH IS MOST IMPORTANT
Were I able to shut
My eyes, ears, legs, hands
And walk into myself
For a thousand years,
Perhaps I would reach
—I do not know its name—
what matters most.
2 replies on “‘There is a light in me’”
Part of her poem The Large Intestine
It’s not me who made
my body.
I wear the used rags of my family,
an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair
after my grandmother, the nose
glued together from a few dead noses.
What do I have in common with all that?
What do I have in common with you, who like
my knee, what is my knee to me
I used to work making perspex boxes for the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. I had to fix specimens of diseased organs by sewing them onto a backing plate that I had to pre-drill with two little buttonholes for stitching the organ on using white cotton and a needle. The backing plate had to be slid into the box then the top had to be glued on and then it had to be funnelled with formalin and sealed with a nylon screw. There were whole shelves and compactuses full of suffering. Busted hearts, alcohol blighted livers, cysts, clots, brains – you name it. It was there. None of it bothered me in the least. Even the smells were bearable in the name of Science, though the colon still smells like heavy animal musk/poo even after pickling in ant venom.
Only when I read ‘Mabel’ or ‘George’ or ‘Pappadopolous’ on the yellow brain buckets did it finally sink in.
Not that I felt like genuflecting or anything. it just became a bit more intimate after that.
Then one of the pathologists showed me a ‘fused buttock’ – it was like a peach that had its familiar split and then had grown together again. there was a bit of blue plastic tubing inserted to show the cavity around which the buttocks had fused. I asked the pathologist how it happened and she replied that the specimen had been taken from a guy who had driven around in a wet wetsuit in a 4 wheel drive and the vibrations and salt water caused sores that healed into each other.
Yes the body is strange…..