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by Wisława Szymborska

It’s come to this: I’m sitting under a tree,

beside a river

on a sunny morning.

It’s an insignificant event

and won’t go down in history.

It’s not battles and pacts,

whose motives are scrutinized,

or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.

And since I’m here,

I must have come from somewhere,

and before that

I must have turned up in many other places,

exactly like the conquerors of nations

before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,

its Friday before Saturday,

its May before June.

Its horizons are no less real

than those a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.

The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.

The path leading through the bushes

wasn’t beaten last week.

The wind had to blow the clouds here

before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,

the world’s no poorer in details for that,

it’s just as grounded, just as definite

as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.

Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.

Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,

but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.

Ants stitching in the grass.

The grass sewn into the ground.

The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.

Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air

on wings that are its alone,

and a shadow skims through my hands

that is none other, no one else’s, but its own.

When I see such things I’m no longer sure

that what’s important

is more important than what’s not.

Translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. From Poems New and Collected 1957–1997, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1998 (poem previously published in 1993). I take this poem to be an ode of sorts to haiku. As Ryōkan said about being present in the moment, “just this! just this!” And so, for Szymborska, it has come to just this—sitting under a tree by a river on a sunny morning. An appreciation for the quotidian is the heart of haiku poetry. Indeed, is what’s important more important than what’s not?