Wisława Szymborska

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Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her poems often touch on themes of war and terrorism, employing irony and understatement to highlight the darkness of her subject matter. Source

The End and the Beginning

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

 

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

 

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

 

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

 

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

 

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

 

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

 

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

 

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

 

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Published:

2001

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2020

2023

Themes:

Strength & Resilience

Violence & War

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Hyperbaton

An inversion of typical syntax (word order).

Litote

Ironic understatement in which a positive idea is expressed using a negative of its opposite.

Polysyndeton

the repetition of conjunctions frequently and in close proximity in a sentence

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times