Contradiction is an inseparable part of the human condition, and that suffices as a source of miraculousness. - Czesław Miłosz

The survivors ran through the fields, escaping
From themselves, knowing they wouldn't return
For a hundred years. Before them were spread
Those quicksands where a tree changes into nothing,
Into an anti-tree, where no borderline
Separates a shape from a shape, and where,
Amid thunder, the golden house of is
Collapses, and the word becoming ascends.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

We are an echo that runs, skittering, through a train of rooms. – Czeslaw Milosz, from “The Wormwood Star.” The Separate Notebooks. (Ecco September 21, 1986) Originally published 1984.