POEMS
CZESLAW MILOSZ
A Ball
He gives to the chief the head of an enemy
Whom he pounced on in the bushes by a stream
And hefted with his spear. --A scout
From the enemy village. It's a pity
It wasn't possible to capture him alive.
Then he would have been put on the sacrificial altar
And the whole village would have had a feast:
The spectacle of his being killed slowly.
They were rather tiny brown people
Presumably no more than a meter-fifty tall.
What remains of them are some ceramics,
Though they did not know the potter's wheel.
Something else, too: found in the tropical jungle
A granite ball, immense, incomprehensible.
How, without knowing iron, could they dress the granite,
Give it a perfectly spheric shape?
They worked it for how many generations?
What did it mean to them? The opposite
Of everything that passes and perishes? Of muscles, skin?
Of leaves crackling in a fire? A lofty abstraction
Stronger than anything because it is not alive?
Translated from the Polish
by
Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass
SUZANNE PAOLA
Prayer To Seal Up the Wombdoor
Because we need to remember
that memory will end, let the womb remain
untouched. Its walls
an image of the earth wi thout us-
