In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Sasha Weiss revisits the work of Wislawa Szymborska:
Her poems often have a post-apocalyptic flavor—she’s a lone archeologist digging around long after humans have abandoned the planet, whistling to herself as she comes upon artifacts like these: "…plates but no appetite. / And wedding rings, but the requited love / has been gone now for some three hundred years…The crown has outlasted the head. The hand has lost out to the glove” (from "Museum").
And yet, the poems have no use for despair or gloomy thoughts; even when they seem to be written by the last person left on earth, they are purposeful, hilarious, and hopeful. She is always posing the question of how the world might be rebuilt from minimal, coarse materials—"Show me your nothing / that you left behind,” she writes in “Archeology," "and I’ll build from it a forest and a highway, / an airport, baseness, tenderness, / a missing home." In another poem, "Autonomy," she admires a sea creature that splits itself into two when threatened, and regenerates—it can “grow back just what’s needed from what’s left." With an almost uncanny prescience, her poems are instructions for a day like today.
The Dish 