It’s National Author’s Day and I’ve been reading Second Space, the final and posthumous book of poems by Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, who died last summer. There’s a lot of wrestling with Catholicism in these poems, but the best of them are ruminations on his life, sparked with crystalline details delineating his past (he survived World War II in German-occupied Warsaw), his loves and his misfortunes. As a relative youngster myself, I find it strange and beautiful to read a 90-year-old’s reflections on life, particularly in this excerpt from “I Should Now.”
I should now be wiser than I was.
Yet I don’t know whether I am wiser.Memory composes a story of shames and amazements.
The shames I closed inside myself, but the amazements,
at a sun-streak on a wall, at the trill of an oriole, a face,
an iris, a volume of poems, a person, endure and return in
brightness.Such moments lifted me above my lameness.