Poetry Reading

I’m curled into a ball

like a dog

that is cold.

Who will tell me

why I was born,

why this monstrosity

called life.

The telephone rings. I have to give

a poetry reading.

I enter.

A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes.

They look, they wait.

I know for what.

I am supposed to tell them

why there were born,

why there is

this monstrosity called life.

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan This is from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, published by Harcourt, Inc., 1996.

10.09.2026

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