"-NONREADING- Bookstores don't provide a remote control for Proust, you can't switch to a soccer match, or a quiz show, win a Cadillac. We live lon… - Wisława Szymborska

We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.

Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at a more precise address — were I to be searched for
I'd be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.

From 'Sky', in the collection 'Miracle Fair

The world, whatever we might think about it terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering — of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants are free of suffering; whatever we might think about its spaces pierced by the radiation of stars, stars around which we now have begun to discover planets, already dead? still dead? — we don’t know; whatever we might think about this immense theater, to which we may have a ticket, but it is valid for a ridiculously brief time, limited by two decisive dates; whatever else we might think about this world — it is amazing.

So how do you
suddenly lose the habit
of yourself?
of day follows night?
of the snows of yesteryear?
of rosy apples?
of the yearning for love,
which is never enough?

from “Moment of Silence