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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 in Bnin, a small town in...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Loss
Affirmation
by Donald Hall
Ashes
by Paula Meehan
Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Catastrophe Theory III
by Mary Jo Bang
Challenger
by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
from Projection
by Lidija Dimkovska
Haunted
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Heavy Summer Rain
by Jane Kenyon
I Found Her Out There
by Thomas Hardy
I'll Try to Tell You What I Know
by Martha Serpas
Loss
by Carl Adamshick
please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop]
by Rusty Morrison
Room in Antwerp
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Song ["When I am dead, my dearest"]
by Christina Rossetti
the lost baby poem
by Lucille Clifton
Poems about Stealing
After
by T. R. Hummer
Against Pleasure
by Robin Becker
America
by Claude McKay
Cahoots
by Carl Sandburg
Learning to Read
by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Museum Guard
by David Hernandez
Stealing The Scream
by Monica Youn
The Man Whose Voice Has Been Taken From His Throat
by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Not-Yet Child
by Joshua Weiner
Poems About War
Henry V, Act III, Scene I [One more unto the breach, dear friends]
by William Shakespeare
The Iliad, Book I, Lines 1-15
by Homer
War Music [Down on your knees, Achilles]
by Christopher Logue
A Wedding at Cana, Lebanon, 2007
by Tom Sleigh
April 27, 1937
by Timothy Steele
Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002
by Marvin Bell
Before the Deployment
by Jehanne Dubrow
Death Fugue
by Paul Celan
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Eighth Air Force
by Randall Jarrell
For the Fallen
by Laurence Binyon
For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell
Grass
by Carl Sandburg
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
by Alan Seeger
I Hear an Army
by James Joyce
i sing of Olaf glad and big
by E. E. Cummings
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
Mosul
by David Hernandez
My Father on His Shield
by Walt McDonald
Peace
by Henry Vaughan
Peace
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Phantom Noise
by Brian Turner
Poems about War
Romance
by Charles Reznikoff
Ships That Pass in the Night
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Spoken From the Hedgerows
by Jorie Graham
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
by Julia Ward Howe
The Coming of War: Actæon
by Ezra Pound
The Czar's Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals
by Norman Dubie
The Fall of Rome
by W. H. Auden
The Mask of Anarchy [Excerpt]
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The War After the War
by Debora Greger
The War Works Hard
by Dunya Mikhail
The Wound-Dresser
by Walt Whitman
Untitled [1950 June 27]
by Don Mee Choi
Veterans of Foreign Wars
by Edward Hirsch
War and Hell, XVI [I am a great inventor]
by Ernest Crosby
War Is Kind [excerpt]
by Stephen Crane
Web Prayer for Milosz
by David Wojahn
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Some People

 
by Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Some people fleeing some other people. 
In some country under the sun 
and some clouds. 

They leave behind some of their everything, 
sown fields, some chickens, dogs, 
mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected. 

On their backs are pitchers and bundles, 
the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next. 

Taking place stealthily is somebody's stopping, 
and in the commotion, somebody's bread somebody's snatching 
and a dead child somebody's shaking. 

In front of them some still not the right way, 
nor the bridge that should be 
over a river strangely rosy. 
Around them, some gunfire, at times closer, at times farther off, 
and, above, a plane circling somewhat. 

Some invisibility would come in handy, 
some grayish stoniness, 
or even better, non-being 
for a little or a long while.

Something else is yet to happen, only where and what? 
Someone will head toward them, only when and who, 
in how many shapes and with what intentions? 
Given a choice, 
maybe he will choose not to be the enemy and 
leave them with some kind of life. 






From Miracle Fair by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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