Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Poetry

Here’s a Polish poem from 1950 in – for reasons that should become obvious – very free translation:

“One needs”
Stars
stars have spread out in heaven
Silence descends from the tops of the town.
One needs
one needs love poems
so that lovers can notice them

In the plan
in the plan
in the six-year plan
one needs
one needs happy families
Let poetry among them become
an ornament to their evening hours.

Communist Poland was so fiercely independent of the USSR that their plans lated six years, not five. The poet in question is Wisława Syzmborska, who went on to better things.

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