What Does It Mean by Czeslaw Milosz

It does not know it glitters

It does not know it flies

It does not know it is this not that.

And, more and more often, agape,

With my Gauloise dying out,

Over a glass of red wine,

I muse on the meaning of being this not that.

Just as long ago, when I was twenty,

But then there was a hope I would be everything,

Perhaps even a butterfly or a thrush, by magic.

Now I see dusty district roads

And a town where the postmaster gets drunk every day

Melancholy with remaining identical to himself.

If only the stars contained me.

If only everything kept happening in such a way

That the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh.

Were I at least not contradictory. Alas.