So where I want to do for half an hour
is just take you through some of this.
There are 50 poems.
It took us two years of occasional work to do it.
After when he fled Warsaw, he and his wife
were immediately picked up by a German patrol,
put in a detention camp.
There were some kids playing football, soccer,
on the field next to the camp, and he
wrote notes and handed the kids and said,
would you deliver these?
And two, four, or five people that he knew they were still
on the outskirts of Warsaw, and one of them
somehow got delivered to a friend who gave it
to the abbess of a convent that was right next to the detention
center.
And the abbess came over and pleaded
Milosz's case, and he and his wife
and his wife's mother who was with them,
were released from the DP camp and made their way
south to Kraków.
And it was in Kraków that he was able to finish up
his wartime poems and apply for this job.
And after a while, he came back to see what Warsaw looked like,
middle of 1945.
Let's say so this is a poem called "In Warsaw."
What are you doing--
let me look at the time.
What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins
Of Saint John's cathedral on this sunny
Day in spring?
What are you thinking here, where the wind
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the brick rubble?
You swore never to be
A ritual mourner.
You swore never to touch
The deep wounds of your nation
So you would not make them holy
With the accursed holiness that pursues
Descendants for many generations.
But the lament of Antigone
Searching for her brother
Is beyond the power
Of endurance.
And the heart
Is a stone in which it is enclosed,
Like an insect, the dark love
Of a most unhappy land.
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter than a hummingbird's feather.
This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles.
I cannot
Write anything.
Five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
A ritual mourner?
I wanted to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me.
Leave
The poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
It's madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the
Flesh was to be singing in feasts
Only the two salvaged words,
Truth and justice.
So this is a poem he wrote before he
arrived in the United States.
He was flown from Warsaw to London.
He actually had lunch with T.S. Eliot,
Faber, because he'd read his poem
and he arrived in New York.
The consulate in New York had arranged
for him and his wife an apartment on the West Side
on about 74th Street.
The consulate was on the East side at Lexington and 71st.
So in January, his walk across Central Park,
must have been his way to work.
It took a while for him.
We'll get to that poem, his Central Park poem.