"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewsk:
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Matthew Kaminski spoke to Zagajewsk, a Polish poet, about his poem, which appeared on the last page of the New Yorker's special 9/11 issue after the towers fell:
Zagajewski, who often purrs his words and speaks slowly, rejects any suggestion that trauma ennobles Poland or any society. Yet thinking of 9/11 and further back, he notes a change in our response to trauma. In “the past in general and not only in Europe,” he says, “the rule was to forget, to move on. There’s a relatively new idea that you have to work on it—that you have to keep everything in our memory. Which I like. It’s changing us. I don’t think people in the mid–19th century were going back to the Napoleonic wars and thinking, ‘We have to work on it.’?”
(Photo: "Bystanders watch in horror in downtown Manhattan as the World Trade Center towers burn," by Patrick Witty / Redux via Newsweek.)
The Dish 