How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks agains… - Czesław Miłosz

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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.

Czesław Miłosz

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About Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet and essayist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Miłosz • Czelaw Milosz • Czeslaw Milosz

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Originators like Czesław Miłosz:

T. S. Eliot W. H. Auden J. M. Coetzee Ursula K. Le Guin Wisława Szymborska

Additional quotes by Czesław Miłosz

The worst possible sexual education: a taboo imposed by the Catholic church plus romantic literature elevating love to unreal heights plus the obscene language of my peers. After all, I was nearly born in the nineteenth century, and I have no tender feelings for it.

Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it, from various ills — A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Earth, what have I to do with thee?
With your meadows where dumb beasts
Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads?
What have I to do with your implacable births?
So why this gracious melancholia?
Is it because anger is no use?

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 hand… - Czesław Miłosz

About Czesław Miłosz

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Additional quotes by Czesław Miłosz