In London, I remember the indignation.
Surely the Nobel prize should have gone
to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we loved
– dissident, charismatic, much translated –
not some woman we had barely heard of?
I thought Polish poems should resemble films of Wajda,
charged with the electricity of war.
Szymborska’s poetry held no such glamour.
She had not played a part in the Resistance.
The poems were almost English in their texture,
a bit like Larkin – though serene
where he was glum – never
expecting to fill a football stadium.
Her voice was quieter than Cassandra’s –
but equally we did not listen to her.
Her vision lay in refusing to make patterns
out of the casual happenstance of fortune
– who survives a massacre, who marries again.
Of life’s mistakes, she only murmurs sadly
This particular course is never offered twice.
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