"You often ask yourself why you feel shame
Whenever you look through a book of poems.
As if the author, for reasons unclear to you,
Addressed the worst side of your nature,
Pushing thought aside, cheating thought."

"A muse with long hair learns to read
In the dark toilet of her parent's home
And knows already what is not poetry."

"If it's all a dream, let's dream it to the bottom."

"Time doesn't hurt anymore, nor help much...
Oh, in the end there is a price extracted
For a young man's joy, for spring and wine."

"It was there everything sprouted, fermented,
Deeper than a rounded word can reach...
It choked him. Inside his scream was another:
That human life was chaos and a marvel,
That we walk, eat, talk, and at the same time
The light of eternity shines on our souls."

"Hours of labor, boredom, hopelessness
Live inside things and will not disappear.
The one who holds the pen, to whom this world
Of things is given, feels uneasy, is afraid."

"Young reader, you won't live inside a rose.
That country has its planets, its rivers,
But it is as frail as the edge of the morning.
It's we who create it anew every day,
By respecting as real many more things
Than are frozen betweena noun and its sound.
We wrest them into the world by force.
If got too easily, they don't exist at all.
So, farewell, things gone. Your echo calls us,
but we need to speak gracelessly and roughly."

"What we do need are forests, clear waters.
For there's nothing here to defend a man.
When he studies the coid of the horizon
The idea of a center slowly fades.
His only counsel is his moving shadow."

"In sculptures and canvases our individuality
Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes."

"I am not immaterial and never will be."

"Spawn of poetry, of the total daring
Of starting one's life at every moment anew."

"There is much with which to reproach us.
Given the choice, we rejected peaceful silence
And long meditation on the structure of the world
Which deserves respect. Neither the eternal moment
attracted us as it should nor purity of style.
We wanted, instead, to move as words move,
Raising the dust of names and events.
We didn't care enough that they disappear
In a thousand sparks and we with them. Even
The disrepute we have taken on ourselves
Was not completely far from our designs,
And so, though unwillingly, we pay the price.

Many a man will concede, if he knows himself,
That he was like one who hears a chorus
Of voices and doesn't know what they mean.
Thence, fury. A foot to the accelerater, as if
Speed could save us from voices and phantoms.
We trailed everywhere an invisible rope
And felt its hook inside us every moment.

And yet the accusers were mistaken, if,
Shedding tears over the evils of this age,
They saw us as angels, hurled into an abyss,
Shaking our fists at the works of God.
There is no doubt that many perished, infamously,
Because, like an illterate discovering chemistry,
They suddenly discovered relativity and time.
For others the very roundness of a stone
Picked up on the bank of a river provided
The lesson. Or the bleeding gills of a perch
Or- the moon rising over banks of clouds-
A beaver ploughing the slumbering softness of water.

For contemplation of ideas without resistance.
For its won sake, ti should be forbidden.
And we, certainyl, were happier than those
Who drank sadness from the books of Schopenhauer,
While they listened from their garrets to the din
Of music fromt hetavern below.
At least potry, philsophy, action were not,
For us, separated, as they were for them,
But joined in one will: we needed to be of use.
And that is the- sometimes burdensome- recompense.

If we, though our fautls were merely historical,
Will not receive the laurel of long fame,
So what, after all? Some are given monuments
And mausoleums, yet in a soft May rain,
Covered by a single overcoat, a boy and a girl
Rush by, entirely indifferent to that perfection.
And some word of us may remain in any case,
Some remembrance of our half-opened lips:
They did not have time to say what they wanted.

Spirits of air, of fire, of water,
Keep close to us, but not too close.
The ship's propeller drives us from you.
It's not fulfilled: the old hope that Neptune
Will show his beard, trailing a retinue of Nymphs.
Nothing but ocean which boils and repeats:
In vain, in vain. Nothingness is so strong
We try to master it by thinking of the bones
Of pirates, the silky eyebrows of governors
On which crabs feast. And our hands grip
Harder at the cool metal of the railing.
Look for help in the smell of paint and soap.
The ship's body, creaking, carries the freight
of our foolishness, vagueness, and hidden faith,
The dirt of our subjectivity, and the homeless
White faces of the ones who were killed in combat
Carries it where? To the isles of bliss? No,
In us storm winds drowned that stanza of Horace
A penknife worked into a wooden bench at school.
It will not find us in this salt and void:

Iam Cythera choros ducit Venus inminente luna."

- from A Treatise on Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz