Heinrich Ferdinand Werner, Spring morning (1927)
It is spring again
It is spring again, spring so astonishingly familiar:
so why is poetry choking on itself? The tree outside my window is committing
plagiarism for the twentieth year in a row, adding green leaves to green
leaves. The flowers of the cherry tree are no different from the first cherry
tree; the same smell as yesterday permeates the air. And—though old people say
this is tedious—my sister is kissing someone under the same tree where I used
to kiss,
endlessly
plagiarizing the first kiss. I could still tell you about the grasses, all the grasses that sprouted from
seeds faithfully and persistently, the same, the exact same grass as months
ago. The world is not afraid to
plagiarize when making new life, and always equally astonishing and
monotonous in its stubbornness
is death. Why then condemn poems of love, why blame them for their lack of
shame and their primitive, chaotic groans of pleasure, faithfully replicated
for centuries, indifferent to who reads them?
Halina Poświatowska (1935-1967). Poems. Translated by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly. Chicago: Poetry Foundation.
