Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski
"You've seen the refugees heading nowhere, / you've heard the executioners sing joyfully." — Adam Zagajewski
About My Mother by Adam Zagajewski
"making the face that best kept her / from seeing herself as she was (I take / after her here and in a few other weaknesses)," — Adam Zagajewski
My Aunts by Adam Zagajewski
“they never neglected the lavender sachets / that turned a linen closet to a meadow.” — Adam Zagajewski
Balance by Adam Zagajewski
“I thought about you and about the emptiness / that can promise one thing only: plenitude—” — Adam Zagajewski
The Sentence by Anna Akhmatova
“I must kill memory once and for all, / I must turn my soul to stone,” — Anna Akhmatova
We Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye by Anna Akhmatova
“You meant more than life to me. I lived through / you not knowing, not knowing I was living.” — Anna Akhmatova
Self-Portrait by Adam Zagajewski
“I'm truly not a child of the ocean, / as Antonio Machado wrote about himself, / but a child of air, mint, and cello / and not all the ways of the high world / cross paths with the life