Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Adam Zagajewski: "On Swimming"















The rivers of this country are sweet
as a troubadour’s song,
the heavy sun wanders westward
on yellow circus wagons.
Little village churches
hold a fabric of silence so fine
and old that even a breath
could tear it.
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he’s been on the road.
Swimming is like a prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part, almost without end.



"On Swimming" by Adam Zagajewski, from Without End: New and Selected Poems. © Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

1 comment :

  1. I love Zagajewski, and would be very pleased if he were to win the Nobel Prize. He's so alert, so visual, and so (as Marianne Moore would say) "unhackneyed"!

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