“This is the first line. . .”
This is the first line. This line is meaningless.
And this is the second line, in which you’re no longer yourself,
which means you aren’t the person from the first line,
and now you aren’t even who you were
in lines two and three, and four, and additionally
in five. This poem is life, I do everything
to be myself in every line, so that every line
by some miracle bends back to me, meanwhile you,
whether you want to or not, must live this life and in
the last line, as close to the end as possible,
make the grade, the subject of which will be
you. You’ll only survive if you admit
that the poem spoke of God. The last line will come
however faster
than
by Tadeusz Dabrowski
from Agni, 2009
translation from Polish: Jennifer Carter-Zielińska