I love poetry the way some people love wine, and I’ve been reading or writing it continually since I was about 15. Some of my favorite poets include Eliot, Auden, Yeats, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Anthony Hecht. But over the past few years I have developed a deep affection for the work of Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish-born Nobel Laureate (1980, Literature). If you aren’t familiar, here’s a taste, a poem titled “Meaning,” written in 1988 and translated by the former national Poet Laureate, Richard Hass. This and many other poems by Milosz always cause me to ask: If faith isn’t a leap, with all the attendant risk that word implies, then what good is it? The tremulous joy of living isn’t in certainty, or even in mathematical probability. The joy, the ecstasy is in possibility!
Meaning
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
– And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
– Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
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