Brain Food #538
To make it count
Thoughts of the day
Though poetry may nowadays be viewed as an old-fashioned, overly romantic form of expression, and one that has been often misused, abused, and mislabelled (does breaking down a sentence into lines qualify as poetry?), there is a different kind of joy to be found in reading a poem. A poem may be shorter in length, but it takes time to appreciate. It is something to return to for more.
Against the pace of the serialised, fast-consumption culture that currently surrounds us, a poem requires us to stop and think.
Similarly, like many other forms of art, the time needs to be right to encounter something that speaks to you. In the same way that one might hear a song and let it pass by the first time, but notice it the second, or that some films or books become culturally relevant decades after their creation, the below (highly accessible) poem by Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, strikes the right chord.
During a time in which life may not be moving forward much, what I like to call our year in limbo, time still passes, unforgivingly, and so does each day. We can choose to let today go, indifferent, or we can make it, and each day, count.
Nothing Twice
by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
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