"After every war someone has to clean up"
This very powerful poem written by Wislawa Szymborska is grounded in a gritty sense of realism and yet it far from bleak, as it shifts incrementally from despair to hope. Symborska is a Polish poet who died in 2012 at the age of 88. You can read a short bio of her here. While the circumstances of her life suggest the war she had in mind in this poem was WWII, the ideas can equally well be applied to this pandemic. (TW) The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall. Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door. Photogenic it’s not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war. We’ll need the bridges back, and n...