You whose name is aggressor and devourer.
Putrid and sultry, in fermentation.
You mash into pulp sages and prophets,
Criminals and heroes, indifferently.
My vocativus is useless.
You do not hear me, though I address you,
Yet I want to speak, for I am against you.
So what if you gulp me, I am not yours.
You overcome me with exhaustion and fever.
You blur my thought, which protests,
You roll over me, dull unconscious power.
The one who will overcome you is swift, armed:
Mind, spirit, maker, renewer.
He jousts with you in depths and on high,
Equestrian, winged, lofty, silver-scaled.
I have served him in the investiture of forms.
It’s not my concern what he will do with me.
A retinue advances in the sunlight by the lakes.
From white villages Easter bells resound.
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One response to “You Whose Name – Czeslaw Milosz”
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So good to read Milosz’s poetry here – or anywhere else. This is from his 1995 collection, Facing the River, but in its faith and its concern with the author’s vocation (“I have served him in the investiture of forms”).and the difficulty of that vocation, it echoes much of his other work. One of my favorite examples is Esse, where a face glimpsed on the Paris Metro leaves the poet “dumbfounded” and finally “left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.” Of course, that suffering, that longing, is also a kind of joy, because the Creator of all that immensity is good.