like a death

i have preferred forgetting.
over remembering.
tearing bills of momentous meals
rather than preserving them.
if only after a thought.
never saving the tickets
of memorable journeys.
i have made sure to tear them up.
never to find them again.

i could have easily put them away in boxes.
cleanly categorized.
when in fact unaware
i have chosen to bear them all along
without faces. each of them remains in air
like a death.
not talked about.
piling on. one by one.
more and more deaths.

making my empty bag heavier. and heavier.
i will begin from now on.
to save those bills and tickets.
i will print photographs and put them neatly in albums.
i will buy boxes and stack everything properly.
store these memories in a corner.
so that they are there everyday.
like a photograph hung on a wall.
ignored. gotten used to.

untitled

like those colorful doors of a dilapidated palace bombed in a war decades ago.
and abandoned thereafter.
we have remained shut for so long now.
that we have forgotten how we too could open, on hinges rusted and tired.
and let the light of a day pass by.
winds and rains too if that isn't too much.
no one wants to talk about what we were meant to be.
the new kids have more walls to play with. with incomplete paintings of the other side.
done by amusing circus animals freed only to entertain a desolate crowd.
they cannot open the doors. they don't even know if these exist.
we are walls now. time has painted us white. the color of quiet.
and we are lost. even to ourselves. why are there remains of a war, always ?

Children of our era

by Wislawa Szymborska translated by Joanna Trzeciak

We are children of our era; our era is political. All affairs, day and night, yours, ours, theirs, are political affairs. Like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political cast, your eyes a political aspect. What you say has a resonance; what you are silent about is telling. Either way, it's political. Even when you head for the hills you're taking political steps on political ground. Even apolitical poems are political, and above us shines the moon, by now no longer lunar. To be or not to be, that is the question. Question? What question? Dear, here's a suggestion: a political question. You don't even have to be a human being to gain political significance. Crude oil will do, or concentrated feed, or any raw material. Or even a conference table whose shape was disputed for months: should we negotiate life and death at a round table or a square one? Meanwhile people were dying, animals perishing, houses burning, and fields growing wild, just as in times most remote and less political. ---- Source: Poets.org

poems

poems very often are short.
and that is why
i can still be with them.
things when they protract,
all of them more or less,
seem to make less and less sense.
among houses by the road
breaking down, falling as i write.
trying to understand things, people.
is the worst of our failures.
for that is not meant to be.
what permeates through is the forgetting.
and what make sense are
things with the span of a dream.
to last unbroken in a memory
obscured by a new war everyday.