Priceless Gifts

by Anna Swir

An empty day without events.

And that is why

it grew immense

as space. And suddenly

happiness of being

entered me.

I heard

in my heartbeat

the birth of time

and each instant of life

one after the other

came rushing in

like priceless gifts.

From Talking to My Body, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1996. Translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan. Haiku, as a poetry of “existential gratitude,” as Billy Collins put it, finds ecstasy in life’s priceless gifts, where the poem stops time. Haiku is often the poetry of the “happiness of being,” and each haiku itself may well be a priceless gift.