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 City of My Youth

 

It would be more decorous not to live.  To live is not decorous,

Says he who after many years

Returned to the city of his youth.  There was no one left

Of those who once walked these streets.

And now they had nothing, except his eyes.

Stumbling, he walked and looked, instead of them,

On the light they had loved, on the lilacs again in bloom.

His legs were, after all, more perfect

Than nonexistent legs.  His lungs breathed in air

As is usual with the living.  His heart was beating,

Surprising him with its beating, in his body

Their blood flowed, his arteries fed them with oxygen.

He felt, inside, their livers, spleens, intestines.

Masculinity and femininity, elapsed, met in him

And every shame, every grief, every love.

If ever we accede to enlightenment,

He thought, it is in one compassionate moment

When what separated them from me vanishes

And a shower of drops from a bunch of lilacs

Pours on my face, and hers, and his, at the same time.

     

            Czeslaw Milosz  (trans. by the Author and Robert Hass)