You, my friends, wherever you are,
Whether you are grieving just now, or full of joy,
To you I lift this cup of pungent wine
As they often do in the land of France.
From a landscape of cranes and canals,
Of tangled railway tracks and winter fog,
In the smoke of black tobacco, I make my way
Toward you and I ask you a question.
Tell me, for once at least laying
Caution aside, and fear and guarded speech,
Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night
When we face only night, the ticking of a watch,
The whistle of an express train, tell me
Whether you really think that this world
Is your home? That your internal planet
That revolves, red-hot, propelled by the current
Of your warm blood, is really in harmony
With what surrounds you? Probably you know very well
The bitter protest, every day, every hour,
The scream that wells up, stifled by a smile,
The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall
And knows that beyond it valleys spread,
Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies
And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel.
In you, as in me, there is a hidden certainty
That soon you will rise, in undiminished light,
And be real, strong, free from what restrained you.
That above the mold of broken flagstones,
Above memory and your transfomration
Which is like the lifhgt of birds when ice
Crumbles in the traces of hooves – above everythin,
It will be given to you to run as celestial fire,
To set sails ablaze with your flame at dawn
When ships trail smoke and archipelagoes
Wake up, shaking copper from their hair.
No, I address you here, from the ashes of winter,
In the simplest words, not to induce doubt
Or to call melancholy, for instance, the sister of fate.
On and on. The heart is still beating.
Nothing is lost. If one day our words
Come so close to the bark of tress in the forest,
And to orange blossoms, that they become one with them,
It will mean that we have always defended a great hope.
How should I defend it? By naming things.
That isn’t easy. I say the word “dawn”
And the tongue by itself affixes “rosy-fingered”
As in the childhood of Greece. The sun and the moon
Have the faces of gods. I am not certain
That Poseidon won’t emerge suddenly
From the sea bottom (he wears an earring)
Ploughing the waves with his motor, towing a retinue of nymphs,
And when I wander in alpine forests and meadows
Every cleft in the rock seems to me a gate
Through which one enters the underworld. I wait for a guide.
And space, what is it like? Is it mechanical,
Newtonian? A frozen prison?
Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation
Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend
I know. I don’t know, and if I did,
Still my imagination is a thousand years old.
Jump into the water with your clothes on.
Such heaviness (deadweight, as sometimes in our dreams).
It’s the same with us. We wear the brocade
Of past centuries or dress in false purple.
Covering our faces with velvet masks,
Classical, playing again what has been played before.
And yet, I affirm, this is the earth of wonder.
It gives us the gift of eternal youth.
To you I lift this cup, here, on the stage.
I, one voice, no more, in the vast theater.
Against closed eyes, bitter lips.
Against silence, which is slavery.
- Czeslaw Milosz
