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Morton Marcus: Good evening everybody, this is the Poetry Show, and this is Mort Marcus Tonight, June 30th, 1987 whic is the 76th birthday for Czesla Milosz, the great Polish poet, e have to call him Polish-Americ n poet now, who has been living

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n this country since 1960 and w o won the Nobel Prize in 1980. A d tonight we are going to have a birthday celebration for Czesl w Milosz by reading his poems fr m the early years all the way p to his last book, which has ju t come out this past year. We a

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e listening to the Polish Sta e National Folk Ensemble n celebration of that and we wi l return in a second with Czesl Milosz said, in fact the last ublished words that he has w Milos

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ttered, he said, "To find my ome in one sentence, concise, s if hammered in metal, not to nchant anybody, not to earn a asting name in prosperity, an nnamed need for order, for hythm, for form, which three ords are opposed to chaos and

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othingness." And he said: [From THE SEPARATE NOTEBOOKS] I did not choose California. It was given to me. What can the wet north say to this scorched emptiness? Grayish clay,

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dried-up creek beds, hills the color of straw, and the rocks assembled like Jurassic reptiles: for me, this is the spirit of the place. And the fog from the ocean creeping over it all, incubating the green in the arroyos, and the prickly oak and

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the thistles. Where is it written that we deserve the earth for a bride, that we plunge in her deep clear waters and swim, carried by generous currents. Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Poland, Lithuania and grew up

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there and was considered to be a Catastrophist poet of the 1930s. And I won't go into the different warring schools of Polish poetry, but he and the fellows of his generation felt that there was or there were ominous clouds gathering. And

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that one of the concerns of one of the schools of Polish poetry, which was a false very ebullient optimism, which was opposed by an avant-garde, which was concerned with form, and the uses of form, to experiment with what language could do, a

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language touched by surrealism, that neither of these could really touch what was about to happen, which was the ominous clouds of fascism and Nazism, which were about to engulf the world in World War II. And so, he became a poet of catastrophe,

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and a poet of prophecy. And of course, the prophecies were borne out by World War II which crushed Poland. During the war, he was in the Resistance and a Resistance fighter. And after the war, he represented the new Polish

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communist government in Paris as part of their diplomatic corps. He very, very quickly soured of that, and broke with the Polish government and wrote a very, very famous book called "The Captive Mind," which is a series of essays that look into tyranny

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and the totalitarian life and what it does to man's spirit. He lived with his two sons and his wife Janka in Paris until 1960, when he was offered a position in the Slavic Languages and Literature department at the University of California at

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Berkeley, and came to California and taught there until recently, well, when he retired at the age of 67, so that was actually around nine years ago. He has since continued to teach classes there and though his Selected Poems had come out, way back in

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1973, with Seabury, his poetry was really not very well known in American poetry circles, though we had very, very good translators and the translations of his poems continued to be excellent.

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It was not until 1980 when he won the Nobel Prize that people began to take notice of him. And since that time, he has been and his poetry has been a major force in American poetry. Now, statements are made by that- like that all the time. What do

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we mean by a major force? Czeslaw Milosz has shown the limits of American poetry. We are as a culture and certainly as a poetry concerned with the self and we are concerned with the self not only with the ego, but we are concerned with the

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self to the exclusion of history and our place in history. Even now in schools, and I as a teacher can say this: students know nothing about history in this country and they want to know nothing about history. That sounds like a

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great generalization, but it is true. Czeslaw Milosz's poetry comes from history, from a confrontation with history. He has seen his nation which was not a nation, which was part of Czarist Russia on one hand, and several countries in the other.

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Then released from bondage between 1919 and 1939, 20 years after hundreds of years being dominated by either Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Prussia, on all different sides, and for 20 years, it had freedom. And then once more with

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a Nazi juggernaut it was taken over and after that has literally become a satellite of the Soviet Union. He is therefore a victim of history in so far as the war and what he's seen it do his country, but he is a victim of history because

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he has become an immigrant. He has become a refugee who lives in a country not his own. And if this seems like a long introduction, let me just say that it is very important to understand all this in hearing his poetry and understanding it

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because his poetry has to do with memory. It continually goes back to a very idyllic childhood near the Issa River [sic] and it is a childhood, which he recalls again and again, in contrast to or confrontation with later history. He therefore brings a

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sense of the world, which is being changed by forces outside us, and this gets him into his look at nature. Is nature magnificent? Is it evil, is it a force that attacks man? Well, as many people have said, Milosz is a Manichean and that is, he

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believes that the world was created by the devil and is in the devil's care, that God has removed himself and sits in heaven and is sort of untouchable. Therefore, man is tainted by his very own nature, as well as the nature around him

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and that of course, in a larger sense, is the nature of history. At the same time, there is a wonder and a beauty in nature, a joy in nature, which continually undercuts or maybe overrides this sense of loss that is continually in his poems and the

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sense of depression, always we come out with a sense of joy, so there is an ambivalence towards nature. It has this relentless movement toward dissolution and destruction of what is living and puts us through great hardship, great suffering. But

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on the other hand, there is a possibility that this endless cycle will change, that there will be a millennium right around the corner. So to me, Milosz is a very definitely religious poet, that there is a lot of religious imagery in this

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poetry is not surprising at all, and that in women and in the sensuality of women, he not only finds the muse, but he finds the person who can conceive new worlds. So, let us go into some of these early poems and notice in this first poem, I will read

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called, if I can find it here, "Mittelbergheim," which is a very idealistic remembrance of a pre World War II Europe that you find all the beauties of nature because he is really a nature poet in many ways. And here is

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MITTELBERGHEIM Wine sleeps in casks of Rhine oak. I am wakened by the bell of a chapel in the vineyards of Mittelbergheim. I hear a small spring trickling into a well in the yard, a clatter of sabots in

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the street. Tobacco drying under the eaves, and ploughs and wooden wheels and mountain slopes and autumn are with me. I keep my eyes closed. Do not rush me, you, fire, power, might, for it is too early. I have lived through many years and, as in

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this half-dream, I felt I was attaining the moving frontier beyond which color and sound come true and the things of this earth are united. Do not yet force me to open my lips. Let me trust and believe I will attain. Let me linger here in

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Mittelbergheim. I know I should. They are with me, autumn and wooden wheels and tobacco hung under the eaves. Here and everywhere is my homeland. Wherever I turn, and in whatever language I would hear the song of a child, the conversation of

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lovers. Happier than anyone, I am to receive a glance, a smile, a star, silk creased at the knee. Serene beholding I am to walk on hills in the soft glow of day over waters, cities, roads, human customs. Fire, power, might, you hold me in the

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palm of your hand, whose furrows are like immense gorges combed by southern wind. You who grant certainty in the hour of fear, in the week of doubt, it is too early, let the wine mature. Let the travelers sleep in Mittelbergheim.

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Well, that dream was very, very quickly destroyed by World War II. And as I said, he was a resistance fighter in World War II. But at the same time, he lived in Warsaw and saw the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish ghetto and

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the destruction of virtually the entire Jewish population of Warsaw, either killed in the ghetto or carted off to the concentration camps, the- not only concentration camps, but death camps.

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And the other part of his poetry that is so important to American poetry and so much a part of his work is not only the confrontation with history, and getting out of that confrontation a sense of order and a sense of place, even if he

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fails to do it and tries again and again and again, it is also that he brings to his poetry an absolutely rigorous intellectualism. He will not let himself be carried away by a cheap or easy emotional response. He is the rational

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mind trying to find answers. And so A POOR CHRISTIAN LOOKS AT THE GHETTO, written in Warsaw in 1943. Bees build around red liver, ants build around black bone. It

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has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks. It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals. Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow

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walls engulfs animal and human hair. Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs, ants build around white bone. Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax, fiber, fabric, cellulose, snakeskin, wire. The roof and

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the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations. Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down, with one leafless tree. Slowly, burrowing a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way with

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a small red lamp fastened to his forehead. He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on. He distinguishes human ashes by the luminous vapor, the ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. Bees build around a red trace, ants build around

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the place left by my body. I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole. He has swollen eyelids, like a patriarch who has sat much in the light of candles reading the great book of the species.

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What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament, waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus? My broken body will deliver me to his sight and he will count me among the helpers of death: the uncircumcised.

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And what you have heard there is the sense of guilt of the sense that he feels that he is responsible as well for the destruction of the Jews in a limited sense, and in a larger sense for the catastrophes of history, for the horror that man

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does to man, he partakes of that. And again, it is this very sometimes unpleasant look at man's place in history, at his place in history, which is so important for us to come to a recognition, a reconciliation, if you will, at our place in the

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world of men in the world of nature, that make these poems exciting, and make them, and we will see, beautiful in their use of language, even in the translations into English. And which make them devastating but so important for our sense of

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ourselves in the 20th century, in a century, which has taken so much from man, and yet has given him so much also. And if we want to understand Milosz, it is as a man who is attempting to live with meaning, and a sense of joy in an age which has seen the

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greatest destruction of man by his fellow man in the history of the world. Here he defines himself as a poet, and he calls this THE POOR POET, again, this is from Warsaw 1944, the very midst of the

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German occupation. The first movement is singing, a free voice, filling mountains and valleys, the first movement is joy, but it is taken away. And now, that the years have transformed my blood, and

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thousands of planetary systems have been born and died in my flesh, I sit, a sly and angry poet with malevolently squinting eyes, and, weighing a pen in my hand, I plot revenge. I poise the pen, and it puts forth twigs and leaves, it is covered with

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blossoms and the scent of that tree is impudent for there, on the real earth, such trees do not grow, and like an insult to suffering humanity is the scent of that tree. Some take refuge in despair, which is sweet like strong tobacco, like a glass of

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vodka drunk in the hour of annihilation. Others have the hope of fools, rosy as erotic dreams. Still, others find peace in the idolatry of country, which can last for a long time, although a little longer than the nineteenth century lasts.

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But to me, a cynical hope has given, for since I opened my eyes, I have seen only the glow of fires, massacres, only injustice, humiliation, and the laughable shame of braggarts. To me is given the hope of revenge on others and on myself, for I

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was he who knew and took from it no profit for myself. And add to this now a sense of anger, a sense of irony and cynicism in these early poems. Let me go on to a poem which is an end of the world poem, also from this time, also in 1944.

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And it's called A SONG ON THE END OF THE WORLD. On the day the world ends, a bee circles a clover, a fisherman m nds a glimmering net. Happy p rpoises jump in the sea, by t e rainspout young sparrows are p aying and the snake is g

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ld-skinned as it should always b . On the day the world ends, women walk through the fields under their umbrellas, a drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn, vegetable vendors shout in the street, and a yellow-sailed

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boat comes nearer the island. The voice of a violin lasts in the air and leads into a starry night. And those who expected lightning and thunder are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps do not

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believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above, as long as the bumblebee visits a rose, as long as rosy infants are born, no one believes it is happening now. Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet, yet is not a

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prophet, for he's much too busy, repeats while he binds his tomatoes: there will be no other end of the world, there will be no other end of the world. And I'd like to read some portions of one of the first

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confrontations he wrote with America, in other words, trying- when I say confrontations, trying to understand America and trying to understand his place in it. And this was written in 1961 based on a reading of some Walt Whitman poems, he loved

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Whitman, still loves Whitman, in fact in his new book, called, "Unattainable Earth," he's got a lot of quotations from Whitman, which show how he was inspired by various Whitman poems and quotes. And so as he makes his way across the United States,

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that's the feeling of this, he talks about America and how he comes to a confrontation in a sense of acceptance of America. And I will read several of these poems. This is a long, rather ten page poem, which is in, oh, let's see in fourteen sections,

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I will read just several of them. THE FIRST ONE When I pass through a popular city, as Walt Whitman says in the Polish version, when I pass through a popular city, for

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instance, near San Francisco Harbor, counting gulls, I thought that between men, women, and children, there is something, neither happiness nor unhappiness. And this is NUMBER THREE.

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If I had to tell what the world is for me, I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole and place him in a theater seat one evening and bringing my ear close to his human snout would listen to what he says about the spotlights, sounds of the music

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and movements of the dance. This is NUMBER FIVE. Waking before dawn, I saw the gray lake and as usual two men trolling in a motorboat, which sputtered slowly. Next, I was

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awakened by the sun shining straight into my eyes, as it stood above the pass on the Nevada side. Between the moment and the moment I lived through, much in my sleep, so distinctly that I felt time dissolved and knew that what was passed still

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is, not was. And I hope this will be counted somehow in my defense, my regret and great longing once to express one life, not for my glory, for a different splendor. Later on, a slight wind creased the iridescent water, I was

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forgetting snow littered on the mountains. And here, a particularly beautiful poem in which he bites into a pear, he tries to remember the sense of the different pears he has eaten. The sense of the past when he

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eats a pear, and it will take him back and remind him of Europe, remind him of Poland. And as you probably know, there are many different names for pears: there's only Anjou pears, there's Comice, there's Jargonelle, there's Bosc, and

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there's Bergamot. And all of this, he builds a poem on and here is the sense of trying to bring back through memory, a sense of the presence from the past, again, the sense of history, the sense of time, which is so relentlessly driving

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us to death and trying to take away all our meanings, all the forms we have made. And the word revealed out of darkness was: pear. I hovered around it hopping or trying my wings. But whenever I was just

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about to drink its sweetness, it withdrew. So I tried Anjou, then a garden's corner, scaling white paint of wooden shutters, a dogwood bush and rustling of departed people. So I tried Comice- then right away fields beyond this (not another)

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palisade, a brook, countryside. So I tried Jargonelle, Bosc, and Bergamot. No good. Between me and pear, equipages, countries. And so I have to live, with this spell on me. And here watching a scene, an obviously California scene. This

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is NUMBER SEVEN. With their chins high, girls come back from the tennis courts. They spray rainbows over the sloping lawns. With short jerks a robin runs up, stands motionless. The eucalyptus tree

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trunks glow in the light, the oaks perfect the shadow of May leaves. Only this is worthy of praise, only this, the day. But beneath it elemental powers are turning somersaults, and devils mocking the naive who believe in them play catch with hunks of

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bloody meat, whistle songs about matter without beginning or end, and about the moment of our agony when everything we have cherished will appear an artifice of cunning self-love. And there are others that are favorites of mine, but I will

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just read one more and go on to one more poem before the end of this section of the show. And that is PAULINA FROM NUMBER ELEVEN. And this is the memory again, suddenly being evoked and coming alive.

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Paulina, her room behind the servants' quarters with one window on the orchard, where I gather the best apples near the pigsty, squishing with my big toe the warm muck of the dung hill, and the other window on the well. I love to drop the

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bucket down and scare its inhabitants, the green frogs. Paulina, a geranium, the chill of a dirt floor, a hard bed with three pillows, an iron crucifix and images of the saints, decorated with palms and paper roses. Paulina died long ago,

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but is. And I am somehow convinced, not just in my consciousness, above her rough Lithuanian peasant-face hovers a spindle of hummingbirds and her flat calloused feet are sprinkled by sapphire water in which dolphins, with their backs

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arching, frolic. And I would like to end this part of the show with a poem to Robinson Jeffers in which again, this acceptance and confrontation this difference yet similarity between himself

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and America, this, if you will, dialogue continues. And in this, he talks to Jeffers, saying "Look, you are Nordic, you're different from me. You are abstract and you look into the heavens, but me, I am Slavic, I am Polish. I am almost Pagan.

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And in my world where I am coming from things are not abstract things, do not have no people in them. Things are full of the human and even parts of nature, trees, rivers, hills, and valleys are given human shape and metaphorical meaning

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and that is the difference between us." And in this way by talking to Robinson Jeffers, the West Coast poet, he comes to some understanding and a sense of what he will accept with America and what he won't. I think it's a wonderful poem.

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TO ROBINSON JEFFERS If you have not read the Slavic poets, so much the better. There's nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood prolonged from age to age. For

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them, the sun was a farmer's ruddy face, the moon peeked through a cloud and the Milky Way gladdened them like a birch-lined road. They longed for the Kingdom, which is always near, always right at hand. Then under apple trees, angels in

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homespun linen will come parting the boughs and at the white kolkhoz tablecloth cordiality and affection will feast (falling to the ground at times). And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths where

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burying a warrior they broke his bones so he could not haunt the living. From the sea night which your forefathers pulled over What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who themselves. [Cut-off].

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behave as if they were at home speak in many tongues, and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience. It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today. And so you may think that

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I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising art with the help of irony. There was a time when only wise books were read, helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing

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through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be. And we are other than how we see ourselves and our ravings. People therefore preserve silent integrity, thus earning the

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respect of their relatives, and neighbors. The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open. There are no keys and the doors and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I'm saying here is

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not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

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And now I will go on and read from his next book, which is, "The Separate Notebooks," all of these books are out now and can be gotten plus many groups of essays and the novel called, "The Issa Valley," a beautiful novel, which really talks about

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all of these themes I've been talking about tonight, as it remembers beyond time, the timelessness of his youth, of the poet's youth in the valley in which he grew up. At any rate, I will read now following, "Ars Poetica?" "My Faithful

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Mother Tongue," in which again, he talks about one of the themes he does talk about a lot, his poetry and the writing of poetry and why one should pursue art. And he writes in Polish, and then has other people translate from it, though he speaks

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English very well. What we are missing, of course, is the word play and the sound of the original language but these are very well translated poems and so he talks about: MY FAITHFUL MOTHER TONGUE

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Faithful mother tongue, I have been serving you. Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch, as preserved in my memory. This lasted many years. You were my native land; I

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lacked any other. I believed that you would also be a messenger between me and some good people, even if they were few, twenty, ten or not born, as yet. Now, I confess my doubt. There are moments when it seems to me and I have squandered my

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life, for you are a tongue of the debased, of the unreasonable, hating themselves even more than they hate other nations, a tongue of informers, a tongue of the confused, ill with their own innocence. But without you, who am I? Only a

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scholar in a distant country, a success without fears and humiliations. Yes, who am I without you? Just a philosopher, like everyone else. I understand, this is meant as my education: the glory of individuality is taken away,

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fortune spreads a red carpet before the sinner in a morality play while on the linen backdrop, a magic lantern throws images of human and divine torture. Faithful Mother Tongue, perhaps after all, it's I who must try to save you. So I will

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continue to set before you little bowls of colors, bright and pure if possible, but what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty. And I think you can see how all the themes the themes of memory,

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the themes of being refugee, and the themes of a sense of order, a sense of rigor with language is one of the things that gives memory and history at least a form. And here he talks about another poet, might as well keep on this. And this is the

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Japanese poet Issa and he has sprinkled through this poem a haiku by Issa. And the poem starts off with a haiku. And what I think I'll try to do is read this in another voice, so that you get a sense of the Haiku when they come in, and

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then his commentaries. READING THE JAPANESE POET ISSA (1762 to 1826) And Issa said: "A good world– dew drops fall, by ones, by twos."

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A few strokes of ink and there it is. Great stillness of white fog. Waking up in the mountains, geese calling, a well hoist creaking, and the droplets forming on the eaves. Or perhaps that other house. The invisible ocean, fog until noon dripping

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in a heavy rain from the boughs of the redwoods, sirens droning below on the bay. Poetry can do that much and no more. For we cannot really know the man who speaks, what his bones and sinews are like, the porosity of his skin, how he feels inside.

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And whether this is the village of Szlembark, above which we used to find salamanders, garishly colored, like the dresses of Teresa Roszkowska, or another continent and different names. Kotarbinski, Zawada, Erin, Melanie. No people in this

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poem. As if it subsisted by the very disappearance of places and people. Another Haiku: "A cuckoo calls for me, for the mountain, for me, for the mountain."

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Sitting under is lean-to on a rocky ledge listening to a waterfall hum in the gorge, he had before him the folds of a wooded mountain and the setting sun which touched it and he thought: how is it that the voice of the cuckoo always turns

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either here or there? This could as well not be in the order of things. And the last Issa haiku: "In this world, we walk on the roof of hell gazing at flowers."

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To know and not to speak. In that way one forgets. What is pronounced strengthens itself. What is not pronounced tends to non-existence. The tongue is sold out to the sense of touch, our human kind persists by warmth and softness: my little

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rabbit, my little bear, my kitten. Anything but a shiver in the freezing dawn and fear of oncoming day and the overseer's whip. Anything but winter streets and nobody on the whole earth and the penalty of consciousness. Anything but.

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And from his new book which is called, "Unattainable Earth," I will read several poems. First one is called RUSTLING TAFFETA. And it is a poem about, again, memory and a poem about women. And I'll read some

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sensual poems at this point. Rustling taffetas. At sunset in a park by the Prypet river. A party sets out for a walk on a path lined with flowers, the fragrance of Nicotianas, phlox, and resedas. Great silence, the

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empty expanse of rising waters. Meanwhile, the servants bring in lamps, set the table for supper, and the dining room windows lit the agaves on the lawn. Lela, Marishka, Sophineta! Lenia, Stenia, Isia, Lilka! Is

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it fair that I will never talk to you in a language not disguised by etiquette as less than a language and now reduced to table chatter, but austere and precise like a thought that attempts to embrace the poor lives of beings?

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I walk about. No longer human. In a hunting outfit. Visiting our thick forests and the houses and manors. Cold borscht is served and I am abstracted with disturbing questions from the end of my century. Mainly regarding the truth. Where does

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it come from? Where is it? Mum, I was eating chicken with cucumber salad. My pretty ones abducted beyond will and guilt, my awareness harrows me as well as my silence. All my life I gathered

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up images and ideas. I learned how to travel through lost territories. But the moment between birth and disappearance is too much, I know, for the meager word. Strings of wild ducks fly over the Respublica's waters. Dew

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falls on Polish manners imported from Warsaw or Vienna. I cross the river in a dugout to the village side. Barking dogs greet me there in the bell of an Orthodox Church. What would I like to tell you? That I didn't get what I looked

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for? Together, all of us naked on the earthly pastures, under the endless light of suspended time without that form which confines me as it once confined you. Seeing the future. A diviner. In a soft merciful night. What

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pigweed grows on the paths of a cut down garden and a narrow gold chain on a white neck? Together with the memory of all of you, parishes. And I would like to read, again, if I can find it. And it looks

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like I might not be able to here. Oh, yes, a poem that he wrote to his wife, who died a year ago and who was with him for many years, Janka. But I think he wrote this actually before she died, though it pictures her dead.

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And this is the poem JANKA. In what hat from what epic is Janka posing in the photograph, above her brow, the wing of a killed bird. Now she is one of them. Beyond the threshold where there are no men, no women, and

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the Prophet does not give separate sermons to the ones covered with shawls so that their long hair does not provoke lust, and to the tanned, bearded man in draped burnooses saved from the furnaces of World War II, trying on dresses in

00:43:52.550 - 00:44:11.390

reflected mirrors and blouses and necklaces and rings. With a hairstyle and makeup from the wars of her career, happy to go to bed or just talk over wine, the owner of a beautiful apartment, full of sculpture. Left to herself till the end of

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the world, how does she manage now? Fleshless. And what could the Prophet find to say, when he has no thoughts of the hair under a shawl, and the secret fragrance of skin and of ointments.

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But after all is said and done, there is this sense in him of being alive and the wonder of life. And I would like to end this by reading two short poems and leaving it at that. The first one is called, "Thankfulness." And, again, let

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me say, as we end the show that we have been celebrating the 76th birthday of Nobel Prize Laureate for 1980, Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish-American poet, who has lived for the last 27 years in Berkeley, California, and who this very

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day is 76 years old. And we will be back next week with a new show, and I will keep you guessing about. But we will end with these two short poems. And the first one is called, "Thankfulness." Well, let me end with, "Thankfulness."

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The first one will be called MY-NESS, that's M-Y and then dash, N-E-S-S, like mine, but my-ness is what he calls it. And then in quotes, "My parents, my husband, my brother, my sister." I'm listening in a cafeteria at breakfast. The

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women's voices rustle, fulfill themselves in a ritual, no doubt necessary. I glance sidelong at their moving lips and I delight in being here on earth for one more moment, with them, here on earth, to celebrate our tiny, tiny, my-ness.

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And lastly, THANKFULNESS. You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter. I give you thanks for good and ill. Eternal light in everything on earth. As now, so on the day after my death.

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Happy birthday, Czeslaw Milosz.