how would you want to be born

If you were to decide, would you want to be born
into exactly the same way you are now?
There is a correct answer and there is 
a truthful one. The correct answer is

always a Yes for all believed-to-be moral
reasons including resignation to fate.
The more truthful one, far from it. Why
would you choose again exactly the same

circumstance that led you beating your own breast
calling out to a universe that does not answer
why all these senseless pain (war-torn refugees,
hunger, true hunger and true abandonment) while

others worry more wind to sail their yacht?
The young people at the university yesterday
organised themselves and came to the streets 
raised their fists in claims of revolution.

Some of them took their poetry and slammed,
invited me to come and speak (with them).
I could not place a word to what I feel.
Perhaps I have grown too old:

I still want to believe, but

if there is no other shore

On Prayer







You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the world is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice:  I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.








Czeslaw Milosz

Translated by Robert Hass