Venice masks

Friday 8 November 2013

You who wronged - Czesław Miłosz

You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line.

Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold medals in your honour,
Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

Czesław Miłosz (1911 - 2004) Poland (born Lithuania)
Poet, essayist and translator, and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature

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