"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 new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Wislawa Szymborska