Reality demands

that we also mention this:

Life goes on.

It continues at Cannae and Borodino,

at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There’s a gas station

on a little square in Jericho,

and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.

Letters fly back and forth

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a moving van passes

beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,

and the blooming orchards near Verdun

cannot escape

the approaching atmospheric front.

There is so much Everything

that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

Music pours

from the yachts moored at Actium

and couples dance on the sunlit decks.

So much is always going on,

that it must be going on all over.

Where not a stone still stands,

you see the Ice Cream Man

besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been

Hiroshima is again,

producing many products

for everyday use.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,

of the mornings

that make waking up worthwhile.

The grass is green

on Maciejowice’s fields,

and it is studded with dew,

as is normal grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,

those we remember

and those that are forgotten:

the birch forests and the cedar forests,

the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps

and the canyons of black defeat,

where now, when the need strikes, you don’t cower

under a bush but squat behind it.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.

Only that blood flows, drying quickly,

and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

On tragic mountain passes

the wind rips hats from unwitting heads

and we can’t help

laughing at that.

Wisława Szymborska, 1993

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh