Skip to main content

Poem sent by Hilda Bernstein after a visit to Mom and Dad in Matumi

ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO   

By Wislawa Szymborska

Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaley,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.

I'm trying to court life' s favour,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I'm always the first to bow,

always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.

Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren't conceived myself!

Life (I say) I've no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone's clone.

I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
Sense of order - gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.

I just don't want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I've been trying
to appease you with my smile

I tug at life by its leaf hem;
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

(Sent by Hilda after a visit to Matumi – February 2001)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...
71 comments
Read more

Aerogramme from Lisa and Richard

To: Mr & Mrs J. Hall, Box 49 Eikenhof (TVL) Johannesburg Afrique du Sud. 28.3.76 Dear John and Nola, Today a week ago we were still in New Delhi with Eve and Tony and the boys and the whole thing looks like a dream. We arrived on the 28.2 in New Delhi and were happy to see the whole family fit and in good health. The boys have grown very much, Phil is just about the size of Tony and the twins are above average. We stayed untill the 22nd March, as our visa ran out and we did not want to go through all the ceremony of asking for an extension. It also got hotter and I don't know how I would have supported the heat. The extra week would also have passed, so we decided not to go to all the trouble with the authorities and leave on the 22nd. I cannot tell you how happy we have been to see such a lovely family, so happy and united. It is rare to experience sucha thing and we have both all the reasons to be proud of them (when I say goth I mean you and us ). There is su...
2 comments
Read more

The mote in Jacqui Smith's eye

Stop your foolish baying! In response to Polly Toynbee's article in the Guardian. These personal attacks are just laying the scent for a massive Tory fox hunt. The Jacqui Smith scandal is designed to make subsequent attacks on the public sector acceptable. The orchestrated Tory attack is nasty and vicious attack aimed at preparing us for a massive campaign of cuts. This is how it works. Shadowy Tory groups with the help of friendly newspapers, spindoctors and top flight PR companies, look for the weakest links: the weak sisters, of the public sector and then attack them. First they attack social services for making mistakes and play on the salary of the person forced to resign, then they look for a poorly performing hospital and attack it, then they look for at MPs expenses and attack them. Freindly newspapers start publishing planted articles about over paid public sector bosses and then, it never fails, they find a juicy little sex tidbit and link it to their attack on the public...
17 comments
Read more