You were my beginning and again I am with you, here, where I learned the four quarters of the globe.
Below, behind the trees, the River’s quarter; to the back, behind the buildings, the quarter of the Forest; to the right, the quarter of the Holy Ford; to the left, the quarter of the Smithy and the Ferry.
Whenever I wandered, through whatever continents, my face was always turned to the River.
Feeling in my mouth the taste and the scent of the rosewhite flesh of calamus.
Hearing old pagan songs of harvesters returning from the fields, while the sun on quiet evenings was dying out behind the hills.
In the greenery gone wild I could still locate the place of an arbor where you forced me to draw my first awkward letters.
And I would try to escape to my hideouts, for I was certain that I would never learn how to write.
I did not expect, either, to learn that though bones fall into dust, and dozens of years pass, there is still the same presence.
That we could, as we do, live in the realm of eternal mirrors, working our way at the same time through unmowed grasses.
II
You held the reins and we were riding, you and me, in a one-horse britzka, for a visit to the big village by the forest.
The branches of its apple trees and pear trees were bowed down under the weight of fruits, ornate carved porches stood out above little gardens of mallow and rue.
Your former pupils, now farmers, entertained us with talks of crops, women showed their looms and deliberated with you about the colors of the warp and the woof.
On the table slices of ham and sausage, a honeycomb in a clay bowl, and I was drinking kvas from a tin cup.
I asked the director of the collective farm to show me that village; he took me to fields empty up to the edge of the forest, stopping the car before a huge boulder.
“Here was the village Peiksva” he said, not without triumph in his voice, as is usual with those on the winning side.
I noticed that one part of the boulder was hacked away, somebody had tried to smash the stone with a hammer, so that not even that trace might remain.
III
I ran out in a summer dawn into the voices of the birds, and I returned, but between the two moments I created my work.
Even though it was so difficult to pull up the stick of n, so it joined the stick of u or to dare building a bridge between r and z.
I kept a reedlike penholder and dipped its nib in the ink, a wandering scribe, with an ink pot at his belt.
Now I think one’s work stands in the stead of happiness and becomes twisted by horror and pity.
Yet the spirit of this place must be contained in my work, just as it is contained in you who were led by it since childhood.
Garlands of oak leaves, the ave-bell calling for the May service, I wanted to be good and not to walk among the sinners.
But now when I try to remember how it was, there is only a pit, and it’s so dark, I cannot understand a thing.
All we know is that sin exists and punishment exists, whatever philosophers would like us to believe.
If only my work were of use to people and of more weight than is my evil.
You alone, wise and just, would know how to calm me, explaining that I did as much as I could.
That the gate of the Black Garden closes, peace, peace, what is finished is finished.
—Czesław Miłosz
