In Warsaw by Czeslaw Milosz

What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny Day in spring? What are you thinking here, where the wind Blowing from the Vistula scatters The red dust of the rubble? You swore never to be A ritual mourner. You swore never to touch The deep wounds of your nation So you would not make them holy With the accursed holiness that pursues Descendants for many centuries. But the lament of Antigone Searching for her brother Is indeed beyond the power Of endurance. And the heart Is a stone in which is enclosed, Like an insect, the dark love Of a most unhappy land. I did not want to love so. That was not my design. I did not want to pity so. That was not my design. My pen is lighter Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden Is too much for it to bear. How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks against The unburied bones of kin? I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot Write anything; five hands Seize my pen and order me to write The story of their lives and deaths. Was I born to become a ritual mourner? I want to sing of festivities, The greenwood into which Shakespeare Often took me. Leave To poets a moment of happiness, Otherwise your world will perish. It's madness to live without joy And to repeat to the dead Whose part was to be gladness Of action in thought and in the Only two salvaged words: Truth and justice.

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