Museum
by Wisława Szymborska
translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh
Here are plates but no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.
Here's a fan—where is the maiden's blush?
Here are swords—where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.
Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number...
Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper's silly hairpin giggles.
The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.
As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I'm gone!
First published in View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.
This poet is one of my favorites. Here, she offers a beautiful poem about the permanence of things, but not of what truly matters: people.
I imagine she had to move around the sleeping guard to see the number of the exhibit he slept on. She is always so brilliant!