Free Map by Wisława Szymborska Page B

paper.
Then just before the labor his mother’s fateful dream.
A dove seen in a dream means joyful news—
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who’s there, it’s Adolf’s heartchen knocking.
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A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Sh-h-h, let’s not start crying, sugar.
The camera will click from under that black hood.
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The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau.
And Braunau is a small but worthy town—
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.

The Century’s Decline
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Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.
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Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
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Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.
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Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.
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A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
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There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
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Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
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Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
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God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
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“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
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Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naïve ones.

Children of Our Age
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We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
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All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
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Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
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Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
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Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
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Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.
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To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
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or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
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Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

Tortures
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Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.
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Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.
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Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones—
real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent.
But the cry with