What’s important and what’s not? We are so small in the vastness of everything that is, but that doesn’t mean insignificant. It means cherished, with a consciousness wider than the sky. Billions of us – and billions of stars, planets, creatures, beings of all sorts – yet unique and intricate and totally interconnected, nothing truly separate. We didn’t have to be here at all, and yet somehow here we are, instead of someone else, instead of infinite other possibilities of not us, not here, not now. And the same for all that is, in every detail.
NO TITLE REQUIRED
– Wislawa Szymborska
It’s come to this: I’m sitting under a tree,
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
whose motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here,
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.
Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those a marshal’s fieldglasses might scan.
This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.
And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world’s no poorer in details for that,
it’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.
Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other, no one else’s, but its own.
When I see such things I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
From View with a Grain of Sand
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
~~~~~~~~~~~
THE ONE
– Patrick Kavanagh
Green, blue, yellow and red —
God is down in the swamps and marshes,
Sensational as April and almost incred-
ible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked;
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked
The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris — but mostly anonymous performers,
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.
From Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems
~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo credit: Bog in Lauhanvuori National Park, Isojoki, Finland, Photograph by Roquai, Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4160405
