Wislawa Syzmborska
Children of Our Age by Wilawa Szymborska - 1986
We are children of our age, it's a political age.
All day long, all through the night all affairs--yours, ours, theirs-- are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not, your genes have political past, your skin--a political cast, your eyes--a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates, whatever you don't say speak for itself-- so either way you're talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods, you're taking political steps on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political, and above us shines the moon no longer purely lunar. To be or not to be, that is the question. And though it troubles the digestion, it's a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning you don't even have to be human. Raw material will do, or protein or crude oil,
or a conference table, whose shape was quarreled over for months: should we arbitrate life and death at a round table or a square one.
Meanwhile people perished, animals died, houses burned, and the fields ran wild just as in times immemorial and less political.
"Children of Our Age" by Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska is a poet and an essayist who lived during the World War 2 in Poland under the German power; since her experiences about tragedies and war as a Polish have affected her literary works. Szymborska used poetry as a historical and political voice of humanity and the ironic and unique point of view that she had gained her a Nobel Prize in 1996. Throughout her
We are children of our age, it's a political age.
All day long, all through the night all affairs--yours, ours, theirs-- are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not, your genes have political past, your skin--a political cast, your eyes--a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates, whatever you don't say speak for itself-- so either way you're talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods, you're taking political steps on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political, and above us shines the moon no longer purely lunar. To be or not to be, that is the question. And though it troubles the digestion, it's a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning you don't even have to be human. Raw material will do, or protein or crude oil,
or a conference table, whose shape was quarreled over for months: should we arbitrate life and death at a round table or a square one.
Meanwhile people perished, animals died, houses burned, and the fields ran wild just as in times immemorial and less political.
"Children of Our Age" by Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska is a poet and an essayist who lived during the World War 2 in Poland under the German power; since her experiences about tragedies and war as a Polish have affected her literary works. Szymborska used poetry as a historical and political voice of humanity and the ironic and unique point of view that she had gained her a Nobel Prize in 1996. Throughout her