Copyright law be damned: I love poetry and want to share some of my favorite poems on this little blog o' mine. Here, for my inaugural installment, I want to share my favorite poem by the great Polish poet, Nobel laureate, Cold Warrior (however reluctantly) and humanist - Czeslaw Milosz.
Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man; I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me - after all I have some decency -
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.
Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley, 1961
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