Life While-You-Wait

Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, has died at age 88. Her poetry is unflinching, wry and although seemingly quite dark, also joyful and humorous. R.I.P.

Life While-You-Wait

Life while-you-wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine, I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step of my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for hammy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run–
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must have been the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.

(From Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Decline or aquiecense?

However pessimistic one may get, there is still preparing and fighting. The answer is never a foregone conclusion, and cool heads must prevail. Prepare for the worst; hope for better. So, is it: Decline or acquiescence?

McCarthy may well be right that “Never before in our history has there been a time when the American idea was under assault and good men argued that virtue and the conservative disposition required capitulating.” He continues: “Our prospects are grim if that is not reversed.”

This is the crux of the whole problem – will enough people wake up in time? When people do wake up, what will happen? Many are just now rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and realising that there is no money for expensive social programs and since that can’t go on forever, it won’t, and the end result may or may not be total collapse. Someone needs to have the cojones to implement austerity measures, curb government waste, shrink government and bring production back to America. The way things are now simply cannot continue, and one way or another the end of the line will come.

 

Invictus – William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Simple Things

Yesterday Tim Murphy posted a poem called Work Early that you should go and read. He has an amazing gift for taking something as ordinary as mowing grass and turning it into something extraordinary. This is what true art does; it makes us see things anew that we normally don’t give a second thought to. Life is not found in perfection or accomplishments or extravagance, but in the every day.

After all, The Years Are Short.