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Poem: “The End and the Beginning”

by on Jan 05, 2013 in Poetry
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The End and the Beginning
(Translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

Wislawa Szymborska


The famous poet Wislawa Szymborska was born in Western Poland on July 2, 1923. When World War II broke out in 1939, she took underground classes and later worked as a railroad employee to avoid being deported for forced labor in Germany. Though Wislawa began her studies in Literature, she had to quit due to a lack of funds. Many of her poems feature war and terrorism and she often wrote from unusual points of view, including the point of view of a cat in the newly empty apartment of its dead owner. Her first book was to be published in 1949, but did not pass censorship as it "did not meet socialist requirements". Working as poetry editor and columnist in Poland, she was described as the "Mozart of Poetry". Wislawa Szymborska died February 1, 2012 in Krakow.