Our stockpile of antiquity grows constantly, it's overflowing, reckless squatters jostle for a place in history, hordes of sword fodder, Hector's nam… - Wisława Szymborska

Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events"… But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world. It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

LA ESTACIÓN DE FERROCARRIL.

Mi no llegada a la ciudad de N
tuvo lugar puntualmente.

Fuiste avisado
con una carta no enviada.

Lograste no llegar
a la hora prevista.

El tren llegó al andén número tres.
Bajó mucha gente.

Entre la muchedumbre se dirigió a la salida
la ausencia de mi persona.

Varias mujeres me sustituyeron
rápidamente
en aquella prisa.

A una de ellas se acercó corriendo
alguien desconocido para mí
pero ella lo reconoció
al instante.

Ambos intercambiaron
un beso no nuestro,
durante el cual se perdió
no mi maleta.

La estación de la ciudad de N
pasó bien el examen
de la existencia objetiva.

La totalidad estaba en su lugar.
Los detalles se movían
por las vías marcadas.

Tuvo lugar incluso
la cita acordada.

Fuera del alcance
de nuestra presencia.

En el paraíso perdido
de la posibilidad.

En otra parte.
En otra parte.
Como suenan estas palabras.

Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is the way it's always been:
bad with large numbers.
It is still moved by particularity.
It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,
disclosing only random faces,
while the rest go blindly by,
unthought of, unpitied.
Not even a Dante could have stopped that.
So what do you do when you're not,
even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar — a premature worry.
Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?
It never has been, and even less so now.
I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,
but what I reject, is more numerous,
more dense, more intrusive than ever.
At the cost of untold losses — a poem, a sigh.
I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.
How much I am silent about I can't say.
A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.

My dreams — even they are not as populous as they should be.
There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.
Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.
A single hand turns a knob.
Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.
I run from the threshold down into the quiet
valley seemingly no one's — an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from — that I don't know.