Poetry Reading

by Anna Swir

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 what for.

I’m supposed to tell them

why they were born,

why there is

this monstrosity called life.

Anna Swir [Świrszczyńska] (1909–1984) was a Polish poet who survived the brutal Warsaw Uprising. Translated by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan. From Talking to My Body by Anna Swir, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1996, page 104. The poem also appears in Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir by Anna Swir, in a different translation by Piotr Florezyk, Philadelphia: Calypso Editions, 2011, page 47.       +