Wislawa Szymborska's "The End and the Beginning"

I've been doing preparatory research in putting together an anthology of war resistance poems, and I came across this poem again by Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel-Prize winning Polish poet. I was surprised to see I knew the translator, Joanna Trezeciak, whom I met last year at an ALTA conference. The poem takes the wide-angled view of what happens to places when the roller of "wars wars wars" moves on to destroy someplace else. That post-apocalyptic landscape is, of course, where so many people just keep on living. Vietnam is not a war, but a place, after all.

"The End and the Beginning"
by Wislawa Szymborska (translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.