Poetry Reading
I’m curled into a ball
like a dog
that is cold.
Who will tell me
why I was born,
why this monstrosity
called life.
The telephone rings. I have to give
a poetry reading.
I enter.
A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes.
They look, they wait.
I know for what.
I am supposed to tell them
why they were born,
why there is
this monstrosity called life.
Credit
From Talking to My Body, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan. Copyright © 1996 Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Date Published
04/01/2018