It is spring again, spring so astonishingly familiar: so why is poetry choking on itself? The tree outside my window is committing plagiarism for the twentieth year in a row, adding green leaves to green leaves. The flowers of the cherry tree are no different from the first cherry tree; the same smell as yesterday permeates the air. And—though old people say this is tedious—my sister is kissing someone under the same tree where I used to kiss, ?endlessly plagiarizing the first kiss. I could still tell you about the grasses, all the grasses that sprouted from seeds faithfully and persistently, the same, the exact same grass as months ago. The world is not afraid to ?plagiarize when making new life, and always equally astonishing and monotonous in its stubbornness is death. Why then condemn poems of love, why blame them for their lack of shame and their primitive, chaotic groans of pleasure, faithfully replicated for centuries, indifferent to who reads them?
It is spring again, Halina Po?wiatowska, Translated from the Polish by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly
my heart is an autocrat
ach! how it runs rampant
obscuring the world
it silences the fountains
and flies up to the eighth floor
quicker than a pigeon
then from the parapet
it gazes for hours
delighting in tiny people
basking in its greatness
my heart is an autocrat, Halina Po?wiatowska, Translated from the Polish by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly
