What do I or someone else care
That there will still be sunrises and sunsets,
snow on the mountains, crocuses,
and mankind with its cats and its dogs?
What do we care
that in a great earthquake part of Northern California
will collapse into the sea,
That the legality of marriage to computers will be debated,
That a planetary cybernetic empire will arise,
That in the year 3000 in Rome they will solemnly inaugurate the
fourth millennium of Christianity?
What do we care–if in our realm the world’s din is fading
And we enter Another, beyond time and space.
In the Dziady ritual they tempt us in vain with a gift of food and drink.
We don’t reply, for we have no language, in which to talk with the
living.
And the flowers wilt, useless, laid when we were already far.
Czeslaw Milosz [last poems]
These works were translated by Anthony, his son, but unedited.
The raw canny ruminations of an elderly dying poet.
Sonia Di Placido 